ERNEST LORD RUTHERFORD

ERNEST LORD RUTHERFORD

( 1871 - 1937)

Rutherford gave us the description of an atom. He showed that there is a small part inside an atom. He developed atomic theory resembling description of a solar system. He raid that an atom is composed of a heavy nucleus in the center, with a positive charge of electricity and negatively charged electrons surrounding it.

Rutherfor was born on August 30, 1871 in Newzealand. He was educated in Newzealand and pursued his higher studies at Trinity college, Cambridge University.

He worked under physicist J.J.Thomson. In 1898 he became the professor of physic at Mc.Gill university in Canada and studied radioactivew disintegration. In Cavendish laboratory he deiscovered that there were different kinds of rays given off by radioactive substances. He called them alpha and beta rays.

He distinguished them and showed that radio activity involved natural transmutation of rado active elements. The alpha rays helped him to decide the structure of an atom. For his work on radio active substances he was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1908. in 1917 he successfully bombarded nitrogen with alpha particles, changing the atoms to oxygen atoms and he became the first person to change one metal into another. He was appointed Director of the Cavendish laboratory in 1919. Rutherford named hydrogen nucleur ‘Proton’. He was the President of the Royal Society from 1925 to 1930.

He died on 19 October 1937 at Cambridge in England. He was buried in West Minister Abbey. The element Rutherfordium whose atomic number is 104 is named after him in his memory. Rutherford’s conclusion that an atom consist of a small positively charged nuclears became the basis for Wiel’s Bohr’s work on the atomic structure. Wiel’s Bohr and Rutherford were intimate friends.