X-Nico

5 unusual facts about Ernest Rutherford


Arthur W. Barton

From 1922 to 1925 he was a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory (in Lord Rutherford's group).

Hydrophone

Ernest Rutherford, in England, led pioneer research in hydrophones using piezoelectric devices, and his only patent was for a hydrophone device.

John Angus Erskine

With the start of the new term in April 1894, Ernest Rutherford and J.A. Erskine applied to use a basement room in which to carry out electrical experiments.

Ruth Fowler Edwards

Fowler was the daughter of physicist Sir Ralph Fowler, FRS (1889–1944) and Eileen Mary Rutherford, herself the only daughter of the celebrated physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford, FRS (1871–1937, the 1908 Nobel laureate in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances").

Te Atatu Peninsula

Te Atatu Peninsula boasts a full complement of amenities including a supermarket, library, community hall, police and fire stations, numerous eating establishments, primary and intermediate schools, Rutherford College (named after Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand scientist recognised for having split the atom) and numerous parks.


Atomic energy

The term originated in 1903 when Ernest Rutherford began to speak of the possibility of atomic energy.

Bohr model

In 1913 Henry Moseley found an empirical relationship between the strongest X-ray line emitted by atoms under electron bombardment (then known as the K-alpha line), and their atomic number Z. Moseley's empiric formula was found to be derivable from Rydberg and Bohr's formula (Moseley actually mentions only Ernest Rutherford and Antonius Van den Broek in terms of models).

Harrie Massey

In 1929, with the benefit of another scholarship, Massey went to Trinity College, Cambridge to perform research at the Cavendish Laboratory led by Ernest Rutherford.

James Vincent Murphy

(transl.) Erwin Schrödinger, Science and the human temperament, 1935, Allen & Unwin, (biographical introduction by James Murphy, foreword by Ernest Rutherford)

Paul Ulrich Villard

In 1903, it was Ernest Rutherford who proposed to call Villard's rays gamma rays because they were far more penetrating than the alpha rays and beta rays which he himself had already differentiated and named (in 1899) on the basis of their respective penetrating powers.

The World Set Free

Wells's knowledge of atomic physics came from reading William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy; the latter discovered the disintegration of uranium.

Waimea College

Students of Waimea College are split into four houses named after four famous New Zealanders; they are Rutherford (Green), named after Ernest Rutherford; Sheppard (Blue), named after Kate Sheppard; Hillary (Yellow), named after Edmund Hillary; and Cooper (Red), named after Whina Cooper.

William Christopher Macdonald

As a result of these expanded facilities, the university began to establish an international reputation that would attract the likes of Ernest Rutherford to teach and where he did the work which earned him the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.


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