Ernest Rutherford

Rutherford s skill and experience in conceiving and building delicate experimental apparatus were cmcial to another project that would prove to be 

In 1903, with the scientist Frederick Soddy, Rutherford concluded that radiation was caused by atoms of radioactive material breaking apart. The tiny bits that broke off were the a and (3 rays. This was a revolutionary idea, since it had been a basic principle of physics and chemistry that atoms were the smallest possible particles of matter and therefore indivisible. Rutherford went on to demonstrate that a-particles were, in fact, a form of the helium atom. He did this by placing a delicate glass bulb containing radon gas, which emitted a-particles, in an evacuated tube. The particles would penetrate the glass of the bulb but not escape the tube, and could then be analyzed. 

As part of these studies, Rutherford and his assistant Hans Geiger created an a-particle detector (known today as the Geiger counter) in 1908. In 1909 Rutherford gave his student Ernest Marsden the task of studying 

British physicist Ernest Rutherford (middle), recipient of the 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry, for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances.  

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Rusting, 45, 85, 405 Rutherford, Ernest, 244 Rutherford nuclear atom, 244 scattering experiment, 244 Rutile, 401... 

Rutherford, Ernest. 1913. Radioactive Substances and Their Radiations. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. 

Rutherford, Ernest. Qtd. in Aaron J. Ihde. The Development of Modem Chemistry. New York Dover Publications, 1984. 

Richter, Jermias Benjamin, 31, 32 Rockefeller, John D., 305 Roebuck, John, 290 Roentgen, Wilhelm Conrad, 38, 46 Rouelle, Giullame Francois, 25 Rowland, F. Sherwood, 265, 266 Rutherford, Daniel, 22 Rutherford, Ernest, 37, 39... 

RUTHERFORD, ERNEST (1871-1937). Rutherford was a British physicist who was bom in the South Island of New Zealand and is famous for his pioneering work in nuclear physics and for his theory of the structure of the atom. 

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