Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson was born on this day 30 August 1871.

Rutherford was a New Zealand born physicist and chemist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. He discovered the concept of radioactive half-life and proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. This work was the basis for his award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

In 1911 after becoming a Nobel laureate, he theorised that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, thereby pioneering the Rutherford model of the atom. He is widely credited with first 'splitting the atom' in 1917 in a nuclear reaction in which he discover and named the proton.

Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. After his death in 1937 he was interred in Westminster Abbey with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom including Sir Isaac Newton. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after him in 1997.

The images above show a letter from Rutherford to Simonsen discussing his theory of the nucleus atom, dated May 7th 1914. The photographs are (from top right to bottom left) A Geiger-counter vacuum spectrograph under construction in the Physics Research Laboratory at Canterbury College, New Zealand; The basement room at Canterbury College, Christchurch, NZ, in which Rutherford performed his first research on the magnetization of iron by high frequency discharges; The original Chemistry and Physics Laboratory at Canterbury College, Christchurch, NZ. Rutherford worked here as a student under the late Prof. Bickerton. It is in this building that Rutherford sent Hertzian waves from one end of the old 'tin shed', as it was called, to the other.

Archives Reference: AAOQ W3872 Box 16 40/181 1 R23796158