Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford (born August 30, 1871, Nelson, New Zealand and died October 19, 1937, Cambridge, England) was the first person to split an atom and as the world’s first successful “alchemist,” changed nitrogen into oxygen. He discerned that radioactivity is the product of subatomic change and thereby ended the chapter on Aristotelian physics which held that all matter is immutable and unchanging. He postulated the existence of the neutron, discovered and named alpha and beta particles emitted by radioactive materials, discovered radon (a radioactive gas), tritium (H³) and He³). He provided definitive evidence for the extreme age of the Earth, invented the Geiger Counter (actually it is the Geiger-Rutherford detector of single ionizing particles), and provided the first theoretical model of the atom.

His list of practical applications is equally as impressive. He built one of the first radio receivers and at one time held the world record in distance over which `wireless' waves were detected, designed a time-apparatus capable of measuring time intervals of a hundred-thousandth of a second, designed and built the first modern smoke detector, as a pioneer in acoustic submarine detection, with W H Bragg, patented the first apparatus for determining the direction of submarine sound.

His list of students includes many of those who made some of the most remarkable breakthroughs in science, including Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron which Rutherford predicted, and John Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton who pioneered work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908

Ernest Rutherford is buried at Westminster Abbey just west of Sir Isaac Newton's tomb and next to Lord Kelvin’s.