Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937)

Three labels are used:

• established: supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources.
• shared: the core fact is sound, but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation.
• traditional: widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Rutherford's science is very well documented. His papers were collected and published, his letters survive, and the major discoveries are fixed by dated journal articles. The standard New Zealand account is John Campbell's entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1996, updated 2002) and his book Rutherford: Scientist Supreme (1999). Campbell also wrote a short study of the family, Rutherford's Ancestors (1996), which covers the Scottish and English background and the voyage out. The Nobel Foundation's biography, the Royal Society of Edinburgh's obituary of 1938 and Peter Galison's Image and Logic (1997), on the cloud chamber, are used for the Scottish links.

The weak point is the family's Scottish origin. Almost every modern account says the Rutherfords came from Perth, and Perth is the town a Scottish reader will meet in most places. But the obituary in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, signed "C. T. R. W.", says only that his grandfather "had emigrated from the south of Scotland", and the Nobel and Te Ara biographies say only "Scottish". The year of emigration is also given in two ways: the Nobel Foundation has 1842, and Campbell says James Rutherford arrived "in 1843 as a four-year old". These fit if the family sailed in 1842 and landed in 1843, which is how Campbell's own chapter titles divide the voyage. The card treats Scottish birth for James Rutherford as established and Perth as the usual but not unanimous answer.

Scotland to Nelson

established A Scottish-born father. The Nobel Foundation's biography describes James Rutherford as a Scottish wheelwright who emigrated to New Zealand with his family in 1842. John Campbell, in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, describes him as a mechanic who had arrived in 1843 as a four-year-old. So James was born in Scotland around 1838 or 1839 and grew up in New Zealand. Ernest was a first-generation New Zealander on his father's side, and a second-generation emigrant family.

shared Perth or the south of Scotland? Most modern accounts, and the standard reference works that draw on Campbell, name Perth as the family's home. The Royal Society of Edinburgh obituary of 1938 says his paternal grandfather "had emigrated from the south of Scotland". The author signed himself "C. T. R. W.", the initials of C. T. R. Wilson, who knew Rutherford for forty years. Perth is not in the south of Scotland in the usual sense, so the two statements are hard to reconcile. Neither the Nobel Foundation nor the current Te Ara biography names a town. The safest wording is that James Rutherford was Scottish-born and that Perth is the town usually given.

established A sponsored emigrant. The family went out to Nelson, the New Zealand Company's second settlement, founded in 1841–42. Campbell's study of the family, Rutherford's Ancestors (1996), notes that Ernest's grandfather was a "2nd reserve" sponsored emigrant who got his place only because two other applicants withdrew. The book's chapters follow the family from Scotland to 1842, through the sea journey of 1842–43, to Motueka in 1843–44 and then to the Waimea district from 1845. Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), describes how New Zealand's planned settlements were built on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's principles of "systematic colonization", which selected working emigrants and sold land to pay their passages.

established An English mother. Martha Thompson was born in England; one modern reference names Hornchurch, in Essex. She came to New Plymouth, Taranaki, in 1855 as a girl of about thirteen with her widowed mother. Campbell notes that she reached Nelson only as a refugee from the Taranaki wars, and that without that war she would never have met James Rutherford. She became the schoolteacher at Spring Grove. She was well educated and ambitious for her children.

established A country childhood. Ernest was born at Spring Grove on 30 August 1871, the fourth of twelve children and the second son. The registrar wrote his name as "Earnest", and the family called him Ern. When he was about five the family moved to a farm near Foxhill. In 1883 they moved to Havelock, at the head of the Marlborough Sounds, where James Rutherford ran a flax mill by the Ruapaka Stream. James was a practical man who built wheels, carriages and mills, and later farmed in Taranaki. Ernest grew up among machines, and his later laboratory style, with simple apparatus and few assistants, reflected it.

Nelson and Canterbury

established Scholarships. Rutherford won his scholarships the hard way, often on the second try. In 1887 he won a Marlborough Education Board scholarship to Nelson College at his second attempt. In 1889 he was head boy and won one of ten national scholarships to a college of the University of New Zealand, again at the second attempt. He played rugby at school and at university.

established Christchurch. He studied at Canterbury College, Christchurch, from 1890 to 1894. He graduated BA in 1892, took an MA with double first-class honours in mathematics and physical science in 1893, and took a BSc in 1894. He won the Senior Scholarship in mathematics. His first research, published in 1894, showed that iron could be magnetised by high-frequency electrical discharges, and he built a detector for radio waves from the effect. He lodged with Mary Newton, a widow active in the temperance and women's suffrage movements, and fell in love with her daughter.

established The 1851 scholarship. He applied for teaching posts and failed three times, and in 1894 he worked briefly as a relief teacher at Christchurch Boys' High School. His chance came through the 1851 Exhibition scholarship, which paid for research abroad. The examiners preferred another candidate, James Maclaurin, who turned it down. Rutherford took it and left New Zealand in 1895. The Te Ara biography notes that he was the first non-Cambridge graduate to become a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under J. J. Thomson.

Cambridge and Montreal

established Radio waves and rays. At Cambridge he first worked on his radio detector and in February 1896 picked up signals over several hundred metres, a record for the time. Thomson then steered him towards the conduction of electricity in gases, a field opened up by the discovery of X-rays. When radioactivity was discovered, Rutherford turned to it. In 1898 he showed that uranium gave off at least two kinds of radiation, which he named alpha and beta rays.

established McGill. In 1898 he became Macdonald Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal. He returned to Christchurch to marry Mary Georgina Newton on 28 June 1900, and their daughter Eileen was born in 1901. At McGill he discovered a radioactive gas given off by thorium, now known as an isotope of radon, and worked out the idea of a half-life.

established Transformation. With the English chemist Frederick Soddy, Rutherford showed in 1902–03 that radioactivity is the spontaneous decay of atoms into atoms of other elements. This broke with the old view that elements were fixed. It was also the basis of his later proposal that the age of rocks could be measured from the decay of uranium into lead. His book Radio-activity appeared in 1904, and he was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1903.

Manchester and the nucleus

established The Nobel Prize. In 1907 he moved to Manchester as Langworthy Professor of Physics. In 1908 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances". He was a physicist, and the prize recognised his work on radioactive change, not the nuclear atom, which came three years later.

established The gold foil. At Manchester he worked with the German physicist Hans Geiger and a young student, Ernest Marsden. In 1909 Geiger and Marsden, following his suggestion, found that a few alpha particles fired at thin gold foil were deflected through large angles, and some came straight back. Rutherford worked out that this could only happen if almost all the mass of the atom, and all its positive charge, sat in a tiny central nucleus. He published the nuclear model in 1911. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who worked with him at Manchester, then combined the nucleus with quantum ideas to explain how electrons are arranged.

established Wilson's pictures. The nuclear model rested at first on counting flashes of light on a screen. In a paper of 7 June 1912 C. T. R. Wilson, working at Cambridge, published cloud-chamber photographs of alpha-particle tracks. Peter Galison, in Image and Logic (1997), notes that Wilson read his pictures as consistent with Rutherford's predictions: most tracks bent gently, and a few turned sharply in single collisions. For the first time the scattering could be seen.

Wartime and the first nuclear reaction

established Submarines. Rutherford was knighted in 1914 and that year toured Australia and New Zealand. During the First World War he worked for the Admiralty on detecting submarines by sound, which took much of his time and many of his staff.

established Splitting the atom. In 1917 he began firing alpha particles into nitrogen gas. He found that the collisions released fast hydrogen nuclei. He published the result in 1919 and concluded that the nitrogen nucleus had been broken up. It was the first nuclear reaction made by human action. In 1920 he named the hydrogen nucleus the proton, and in his Bakerian Lecture he predicted a neutral particle in the nucleus, which his colleague James Chadwick found in 1932.

shared What happened in the reaction? Rutherford first described the nitrogen experiment as disintegration, the chipping of a proton off the nucleus. The cloud chamber settled the matter. Galison records that Patrick Blackett, working under Rutherford at the Cavendish, photographed some 400,000 alpha-particle tracks and found eighteen that showed the reaction. They proved that the alpha particle was absorbed and the nitrogen became a heavy form of oxygen. Popular accounts that say Rutherford "split the atom" in 1917, or in 1919, are both partly right: the experiments began in 1917 and were published in 1919. John Campbell's own notes correct the date of the first split to 1917.

The Cavendish

established Director. In 1919 Rutherford succeeded J. J. Thomson as Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge. He led the laboratory until his death. Under him it produced a remarkable run of results: Chadwick's neutron, and the first splitting of the nucleus by artificially accelerated particles, by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, both in 1932. Blackett, Chadwick, Cockcroft and Walton all later won Nobel prizes.

established The Scottish instrument. Galison writes that his history of the cloud chamber follows the instrument from "the storm-drenched hills of Scotland" to the centre of particle physics. Wilson had begun by trying to recreate in the laboratory the clouds and glories he saw from the summit observatory on Ben Nevis in 1894. Rutherford called the result "the most original and wonderful instrument in scientific history". Blackett gave the credit to both men: he was provided, he wrote, "by Rutherford with so fine a problem, by C. T. R. Wilson with so powerful a method". Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927.

established Public life. Rutherford was President of the Royal Society from the mid-1920s to 1930 and of the Institute of Physics from 1931 to 1933. He received the Order of Merit in 1925 and was made Baron Rutherford of Nelson in 1931. In 1933 he became president of the Academic Assistance Council, which helped scholars dismissed by the Nazi regime to find posts in Britain.

established Private grief. His only child, Eileen, married the physicist Ralph Fowler. She died in December 1930, aged 29, soon after the birth of her fourth child. The barony passed to no one when he died, since he had no son.

Death

established Cambridge, 1937. In October 1937 Rutherford had a partially strangulated umbilical hernia. Campbell writes that his death followed delays in operating. He died at Cambridge on 19 October 1937, aged 66. His ashes were interred in the nave of Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin. Kelvin, born in Belfast, had been professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow for more than fifty years, so Rutherford lies beside the most famous physicist of Victorian Scotland.

established Lady Rutherford. Mary Rutherford retired to Christchurch and died there in 1954.

New Zealand and memory

established Visits home. Rutherford visited New Zealand in 1900 to marry, in 1905, in 1914 and in 1925. On the 1925 tour he received civic receptions across the country. He urged the government to fund research, and in 1926 New Zealand set up its Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

established Commemoration. The Te Ara biography lists the main memorials. His portrait has been on the New Zealand $100 note since 1992. Element 104 was proposed as rutherfordium in 1969 and formally named in 1997. Four countries have put him on stamps. A memorial at his birthplace in Brightwater opened in 1991, with a bronze statue of a boy; Havelock and Nelson College have memorials too, and Christchurch has Rutherford's Den in the old university buildings.

shared How Scottish? Rutherford thought of himself as a New Zealander. He took his title from Nelson, not from any Scottish place. The Scottish side of his life is real but specific: a Scottish-born father and grandparents, an honorary fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a working friendship with a Scottish physicist whose instrument made his atom visible. T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), warns against exaggerating the Scottish factor in New Zealand. He points out that Scots were over-represented among successful settlers, but not overwhelmingly.

• Rutherford's birth was registered as "Earnest", and his family called him Ern.
• He failed three times to get a permanent school-teaching post before his scholarship to Cambridge.
• He got the 1851 Exhibition scholarship only because the examiners' first choice turned it down.
• His Nobel Prize was in chemistry, not physics.
• He married the daughter of his Christchurch landlady, a suffrage campaigner.
• The cloud chamber that photographed his nuclear reactions began as an attempt to recreate the clouds over Ben Nevis.
• The Royal Society of Edinburgh's obituary of Rutherford was written by C. T. R. Wilson.
• His ashes lie in Westminster Abbey near those of Newton and Kelvin.

• Myth: Rutherford was Scottish. He was a New Zealander, born near Nelson to a Scottish-born father and an English-born mother.
• Disputed: the family came from Perth. Perth is the town most often named, but the Royal Society of Edinburgh obituary written by his friend C. T. R. Wilson says the grandfather came from "the south of Scotland". The Nobel and Te Ara biographies say only that the family was Scottish.
• Disputed: the family emigrated in 1842. They sailed in 1842 and, by John Campbell's account, landed in 1843, when James Rutherford was four. Both years appear in reliable sources.
• Myth: Rutherford's mother was Scottish too. Martha Thompson was English-born and came to New Zealand with her widowed mother.
• Disputed: Rutherford split the atom in 1919. The nitrogen experiments began in 1917 and were published in 1919. The first splitting of nuclei by machine-accelerated particles came in his laboratory in 1932, by Cockcroft and Walton.
• Myth: the gold-foil experiment was done by Rutherford himself. Geiger and Marsden made the measurements in 1909, at his suggestion. Rutherford supplied the interpretation in 1911.
• Myth: his Nobel Prize was for the nuclear atom. It was awarded in 1908, three years before the nucleus, for his work on radioactive decay.
• Disputed: the year of his Royal Society presidency. Sources give 1925–30 or 1926–30, depending on whether they count from his election in late 1925.