Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford
(1871-1937)

Ernest Rutherford, Baron Rutherford of Nelson, nuclear physicist and winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, is to be ranked in fame with Sir Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday. Indeed, just as Faraday is called the "father of electricity," so a similar description might be applied to Rutherford in relation to nuclear energy. He contributed substantially to the understanding of the disintegration and transmutation of the radioactive elements, discovered and named the particles expelled from radium, identified the alpha particle as a helium atom and with its aid evolved the nuclear theory of atomic structure, and used that particle to produce the first artificial disintegration of elements. Rutherford was the principal founder of the field of atomic physics. In the universities of McGill, Manchester, and Cambridge he led and inspired two generations of physicists who--to use his own words--"turned out the facts of Nature," and in the Cavendish Laboratory his "boys" discovered the neutron and artificial disintegration by accelerated particles.

Early life.
Rutherford was born in Spring Grove, New Zealand, on Aug. 30, 1871, the fourth of the 12 children of James, a wheelwright at Brightwater near Nelson on South Island, and Martha Rutherford. His parents, who had emigrated from Great Britain, denied themselves many comforts so that their children might be well educated. In 1887 Ernest won a scholarship to Nelson College, a secondary school, where he was a popular boy, clever with his hands, and a keen footballer. He won prizes in history and languages as well as mathematics. Another scholarship allowed him to enroll in Canterbury College, Christchurch, from where he graduated with a B.A. in 1892 and an M.A. in 1893 with first-class honours in mathematics and physics. Financing himself by part-time teaching, he stayed for a fifth year to do research in physics, studying the properties of iron in high-frequency alternating magnetic fields. He found that he could detect the electromagnetic waves--wireless waves--newly discovered by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, even after they had passed through brick walls. Two substantial scientific papers on this work won for him an "1851 Exhibition" scholarship, which provided for further education in England.
Before leaving New Zealand he became unofficially engaged to Mary Newton, a daughter of his landlady in Christchurch. Mary preserved his letters from England, as did his mother, who lived to age 92. Thus, a wealth of material is available that sheds much light on the nonscientific aspects of his fascinating personality.

On his arrival in Cambridge in 1895, Rutherford began to work under J.J. Thomson, professor of experimental physics at the university's Cavendish Laboratory. Continuing his work on the detection of Hertzian waves over a distance of two miles, he gave an experimental lecture on his results before the Cambridge Physical Society and was delighted when his paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, a signal honour for so young an investigator.

Rutherford made a great impression on colleagues in the Cavendish Laboratory, and Thomson held him in high esteem. He also aroused jealousies in the more conservative members of the Cavendish fraternity, as is clear from his letters to Mary. In December 1895, when Rontgen discovered X rays, Thomson asked Rutherford to join him in a study of the effects of passing a beam of X rays through a gas. They discovered that the X rays produced large quantities of electrically charged particles, or carriers of positive and negative electricity, and that these carriers, or ionized atoms, recombined to form neutral molecules. Working on his own, Rutherford then devised a technique for measuring the velocity and rate of recombination of these positive and negative ions. The published papers on this subject remain classics to the present day.

In 1896 the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium emitted rays that could fog a photographic plate as did X rays. Rutherford soon showed that they also ionized air but that they were different from X rays, consisting of two distinct types of radiation. He named them alpha rays, highly powerful in producing ionization but easily absorbed, and beta rays, which produced less radiation but had more penetrating ability. He thought they must be extremely minute particles of matter.

In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to the chair of physics at McGill University in Montreal. To Mary he wrote, "the salary is only 500 pounds but enough for you and me to start on." In the summer of 1900 he traveled to New Zealand to visit his parents and get married. When his daughter Eileen, their only child, was born the next year, he wrote his mother "it is suggested that I call her 'Ione' after my respect for ions in gases."

Contributions in physics.
Toward the end of the 19th century many scientists thought that no new advances in physics remained to be made. Yet within three years Rutherford succeeded in marking out an entirely new branch of physics called radioactivity. He soon discovered that thorium or its compounds disintegrated into a gas that in turn disintegrated into an unknown "active deposit," likewise radioactive. Rutherford and a young chemist, Frederick Soddy, then investigated three groups of radioactive elements--radium, thorium, and actinium. They concluded in 1902 that radioactivity was a process in which atoms of one element spontaneously disintegrated into atoms of an entirely different element, which also remained radioactive. This interpretation was opposed by many chemists who held firmly to the concept of the indestructibility of matter; the suggestion that some atoms could tear themselves apart to form entirely different kinds of matter was to them a remnant of medieval alchemy.
Nevertheless, Rutherford's outstanding work won him recognition by the Royal Society, which elected him a fellow in 1903 and awarded him the Rumford medal in 1904. In his book Radio-activity (1904) he summarized the results of research in that subject. The evidence he marshaled for radioactivity was that it is unaffected by external conditions, such as temperature and chemical change; that more heat is produced than in an ordinary chemical reaction; that new types of matter are produced at a rate in equilibrium with the rate of decay; and that the new products possess distinct chemical properties.

Rutherford, a prodigious worker with tremendous powers of concentration, continued to make a succession of brilliant discoveries--and with remarkably simple apparatus. For example, he showed (1903) that alpha rays can be deflected by electric and magnetic fields, the direction of the deflection proving that the rays are particles of positive charge; he determined their velocity and the ratio of their charge (E) to their mass (M). These results were obtained by passing such particles between thin, matchbox-sized metal plates stacked closely together, each plate charged oppositely to its neighbour, in one experiment and in another experiment putting the assembly in a strong magnetic field; in each experiment he measured the strengths of the fields which just sufficed to prevent the particles from emerging from the stack.

Rutherford wrote 80 scientific papers during his seven years at McGill, made many public appearances, among them the Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale University in 1905, and received offers of chairs at other universities. In 1907 he returned to England to accept a chair at the University of Manchester, where he continued his research on the alpha particle. With the ingenious apparatus that he and his research assistant, Hans Geiger, had invented, they counted the particles as they were emitted one by one from a known amount of radium; and they also measured the total charge collected, from which the charge on each particle could be detected. Combining this result with the rate of production of helium from radium, determined by Rutherford and the American chemist Bertram Borden Boltwood, Rutherford was able to deduce Avogadro's number (the constant number of molecules in the molecular weight in grams of any substance) in the most direct manner conceivable. With his student Thomas D. Royds he proved in 1908 that the alpha particle really is a helium atom by allowing alpha particles to escape through the thin glass wall of a containing vessel into an evacuated outer glass tube and showing that the spectrum of the collected gas was that of helium. Almost immediately, in 1908, came the Nobel Prize--but for chemistry, for his investigations concerning the disintegration of elements.

In 1911 Rutherford made his greatest contribution to science with his nuclear theory of the atom. He had observed in Montreal that fast-moving alpha particles on passing through thin plates of mica produced diffuse images on photographic plates, whereas a sharp image was produced when there was no obstruction to the passage of the rays. He considered that the particles must be deflected through small angles as they passed close to atoms of the mica, but calculation showed that an electric field of 100,000,000 volts per centimetre was necessary to deflect such particles traveling at 20,000 kilometres per second, a most astonishing conclusion. This phenomenon of scattering was found in the counting experiments with Geiger; Rutherford suggested to Geiger and a student, Ernest Marsden, that it would be of interest to examine whether any particles were scattered backward--i.e., deflected through an angle of more than 90 degrees. To their astonishment, a few particles in every 10,000 were indeed so scattered, emerging from the same side of a gold foil as that on which they had entered. After a number of calculations, Rutherford came to the conclusion that the intense electric field required to cause such a large deflection could occur only if all the positive charge in the atom, and therefore almost all the mass, were concentrated on a very small central nucleus some 10,000 times smaller in diameter than that of the entire atom. The positive charge on the nucleus would therefore be balanced by an equal charge on all the electrons distributed somehow around the nucleus. This theory of atomic structure is known as the Rutherford atomic model.

Although in 1904 Hantaro Nagaoka, a Japanese physicist, had proposed an atomic model with electrons rotating in rings about a central nucleus, it was not taken seriously, because, according to classical electrodynamics, electrons in orbit would have a centripetal acceleration toward the centre of rotation and would thus radiate away their energy, falling into the central nucleus almost immediately. This idea is in marked contrast with the view developed by J.J. Thomson in 1910; he envisaged all the electrons distributed inside a uniformly charged positive sphere of atomic diameter, in which the negative "corpuscles" (electrons) are imbedded. It was not until 1913 that Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, postulated that electrons, contrary to classical electrodynamics, do not radiate energy during rotation and do indeed move in orbits about a central nucleus, thus upholding the convictions of Nagaoka and Rutherford. A knighthood conferred in 1914 further marked the public recognition of Rutherford's services to science.

Later years.
During World War I he worked on the practical problem of submarine detection by underwater acoustics. He produced the first artificial disintegration of an element in 1919, when he found that on collision with an alpha particle an atom of nitrogen was converted into an atom of oxygen and an atom of hydrogen. The same year he succeeded Thomson as Cavendish professor. Although his experimental contributions henceforth were not as numerous as in earlier years, his influence on research students was enormous. In the second Bakerian lecture he gave to the Royal Society in 1920, he speculated upon the existence of the neutron and of isotopes of hydrogen and helium; three of them were eventually discovered by workers in the Cavendish Laboratory.
His service as president of the Royal Society (1925-30) and as chairman of the Academic Assistance Council, which helped almost 1,000 university refugees from Germany, increased the claims upon his time. But whenever possible he worked in the Cavendish Laboratory, where he encouraged students, probed for the facts, and always sought an explanation in simple terms. When in 1934 Enrico Fermi in Rome successfully disintegrated many different elements with neutrons, Rutherford wrote to congratulate him "for escaping from theoretical physics."

Rutherford read widely and enjoyed good health, the game of golf, his home life, and hard work. He could listen to the views of others, his judgments were fair, and from his many students he earned affection and esteem. In 1931 he was made a peer, but any gratification this honour may have brought was marred by the death of his daughter. He died in Cambridge on Oct. 19, 1937, following a short illness, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.
James Chadwick (compiler), The Collected Papers of Lord Rutherford of Nelson, 3 vol. (1962-65), is a useful resource. A.S. Eve, Rutherford (1939), is the official biography sanctioned by Lady Rutherford. Further studies of his life and work include E.N. da C. Andrade, Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom (1964, reprinted 1978), a biographical treatment that emphasizes the development of Rutherford's ideas; J.B. Birks (ed.), Rutherford at Manchester (1962), a discussion of his work at the university there; N. Feather, Lord Rutherford, new ed. (1973), a discussion of his research work at Cambridge University; Mario Bunge and William R. Shea (eds.), Rutherford and Physics at the Turn of the Century (1979), a discussion of developments in physics between 1895 and 1905; Thaddeus J. Trenn, The Self-splitting Atom (1977), an account of the Rutherford-Soddy collaboration; Lawrence Badash (ed.), Rutherford and Boltwood (1969), containing the correspondence between the two scientists concerning the question of radioactivity; and David Wilson, Rutherford: Simple Genius (1983), a full account incorporating much new material.