Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson (1871 to 1937), was a New Zealand physicist and chemist who pioneered research in atomic and nuclear physics and has been called the father of nuclear physics. Born near Nelson in New Zealand, he took the Macdonald Chair of Physics at McGill University in 1898, where with Frederick Soddy he showed that radioactivity is the transmutation of one element into another, and where he developed the concept of radioactive half-life and distinguished and named alpha and beta radiation. At Manchester he proved with Thomas Royds that alpha radiation is helium nuclei, in 1911 he theorised that an atom's charge is concentrated in a very small nucleus, and in 1917 he performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction by bombarding nitrogen nuclei with alpha particles, which led to his discovery of the proton. As Director of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1919 he led the laboratory in which James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932 and in which John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton performed the first controlled experiment to split the nucleus. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.