Rutherford, John

Gettens, Rutherford John, The Freer Chinese Bronzes Volume II, Tech-... 

Camphell, John. Rutherford A Brief Biography. Available online. URL http //www.rutherford.org.nz/biography.htm. 

In spite of the excitement the race to transmutation had spurred in the worlds of chemistry and occult alchemy, the crash came in 1914. The prestige and identity transmutation efforts had conferred upon chemistry were called into question—by physicists. Criticism had already come heavily from physicists such as J. J. Thomson, who debunked some of the experiments following the announcement of the Chemical Society meeting in February 1913, as well as from Rutherford, Royds, and Robert John Strutt (Lord Rayleigh). Even sympathetic chemists such as Madame Curie had been unable to reproduce Ramsay s results. Ramsay s own student and research partner, Egerton, could not successfully repeat the experiments when he went to work in a lab in Berlin. 

Corning Drierite Fisher-Johns Luer-Lok Corning Glass Works, Corning, New York W. A. Hammond Drierite Company, Xenia, Ohio Fisher Scientific Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Becton, Dickinson and Company, Rutherford, New Jersey... 

D r. Rutherford served as professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh from 1786 to 1819, and was thus contemporary with Joseph Black, Charles Hope, and John Robison. He invented an ingenious maximum and minimum thermometer which is described in many modem textbooks of physics. The tragic circumstances surrounding his sudden death were described by Sir Walter in numerous letters to members of his family. 

The correspondence of Sir Walter Scott, his family genealogy, and the ten-volume biography by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, contain frequent allusions to Scott s grandfather, Dr. John Rutherford, one of the founders of the medical school at the University of Edinburgh, and to his uncle, Dr. Daniel Rutherford, who is usually regarded as the discoverer of the element nitrogen. In the genealogy of the Scott family one may read ... 

By his first wife, Jean Swinton, Professor John Rutherford had a son, John, who died young, and a daughter Anne, who married0 Walter Scott, writer to the Signet, and became the mother of Sir Walter Scott Bart. He married, secondly, on the 9th August, 1743, Anne M Kay, by whom he had five sons and three daughters.. . . Daniel Rutherford, second son of Professor John Rufcher-... 

As might be expected, the Rutherfords, both father and son, served as physicians to the Scott family. When Sir Walter was only eighteen months old, Ins right leg became paralyzed, and, after the best physicians had failed in their attempts to restore the use of it, his grandfather, Dr. John Rutherford, had him sent to live in the country (3, 4). During a serious illness in later life, Scott submitted without a murmur to the severe discipline prescribed by his affectionate physician [Dr. Daniel] Rutherford. . . (5). 

Herman Boerhaave, 1668-1738. Dutch physician, anatomist, chemist, and botanist. The Edinburgh Medical School was founded by pupils of Boerhaave while he was still m his pmne. John Rutherford, father of Daniel Rutherford, was one of his devoted disciples. See also ref. (42). 

Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832. Scottish novelist and poet. His writings contain many interesting allusions to his uncle, Dr. Daniel Rutherford. Scott s circle of friends included Dr William Hyde Wollaston, Sir David Brewster, Dr. John Davy, Sir Humphry Davy, and Joseph Black. 

In 1786 Rutherford was appointed successor to John Hope, the professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh, and in the same year he was married to Harriet Mitchelson of Middleton (I). With pardonable family pride, Sir Walter Scott once said that Dr. Rutherford ought to have had the chemistry class, as he was one of the best chemists in Europe ... 

Dr. and Mrs. Rutherford had two sons and three daughters, but in 1805 the elder son, John, a boy of seventeen, was lost in the shipwreck of an East Indiaman commanded by John Wordsworth, a brother of the famous poet. After his words of sympathy to William Wordsworth, Scott wrote, .. . The same dreadful catastrophe deprived me of a near relation, a delightful and promising youth, the hope and pride of his parents. He had just obtained a cadetship, and parted from us all in the ardor of youthful hope and expectation, leaving his father (a brother of my mother) almost heartbroken at his departure.. . (35). Fourteen years later Scott said, when writing to his son at the time of Dr. Rutherford s death, Since you knew him, his health was broken and his spirits dejected, which may be traced to the loss of his eldest son. . . (30). 

According to J. J. Thomson, Lord Rutherford s death on October 19, 1937, just on the eve of his having in the High-Tension Laboratory means of research far more powerful than those with which he had already obtained results of profound importance, is, I think, one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Science (101, 102). Lord Rutherford was the first scientist born in the overseas dominions to be buried in Westminster Abbey, beside the graves of Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin, Charles Darwin, and Sir John Herschel. 

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... 

Editor s Note We are grateful to Prof. John Seinfeld (California Institute ofTechnol-ogy) for bringing our attention to the following poem, written by Prof. Rutherford Aris of the University of Minnesota to congratulate Princeton University s Chemical Engineering Department on their fiftieth anniversary. 

See section 0006 for the contributions to atomic theory of John Dalton, J. J. Thomson, Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger. 

Three main tendencies have been underlined in recent studies of structure and action mechanism ofbacterial photosynthetic reaction centers. The crystallographic structure of the reaction centers from Rps. viridis and Rb. spheroids was initially determined to be 2.8 and 3 A resolutions (Michel and Deisenhofer et al., 1985 Allen et al., 1986). Resolution and refinement of these structures have been subsequently extended to 2.2, 2.3 and 2.6 A. (Rees et al., 1989 Stowell et al., 1997, Fyfe and Johns, 2000 Rutherford and Faller, 2001). Investigations of the electronic structure of donor and acceptor centers in the ground and exited states by modern physical methods with a combination ofpico-and femtosecond kinetic techniques have become more precise and elaborate. Extensive experimental and theoretical investigations on the role of orbital overlap and protein dynamics in the processes of electron and proton transfer have been done. All the above-mentioned research directions are accompanied by extensive use of methods of sit-directed mutagenesis and substitution of native pigments for artificial compounds of different redox potential. 

John Dalton (1766-1844) presented the first scientific proof of the existence of the atom based upon his experimental study. At the start of the 20 century, the theories and empirical studies conducted by Thomson, Rutherford, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Shrodinger... that delved into atom s stmcture greatly impacted today s progress. 

Dalton, John. (1766-1844). The first theorist since the Greek philosopher Democritus to conceive of matter in terms of small particles. The founder of the atomic theory on which all succeeding chemical investigation has been based (1807). His essential concept of the indivisibility of the atom was not called into question until 1910 when radioactive decay was established by Rutherford. Dalton s theories relating to pressures of gases and atomic combinations led to the basic generalizations stated in the law of multiple proportions, the law of constant composition, and the law of conservation of matter. 

Speculations about the nature of matter date back to ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, who lived in the sixth century b.c.e., and Democritus, who lived in the fifth century b.c.e., and to whom we credit the first theory of atoms. It has taken two and a half millennia for natural philosophers and, more recently, for chemists and physicists to arrive at a modern understanding of the nature of elements and compounds. By the 19th century, chemists such as John Dalton of England had learned to define elements as pure substances that contain only one kind of atom. It took scientists like the British physicists Joseph John Thomson and Ernest Rutherford in the early years of the 20th century, however, to demonstrate what atoms are—entities composed of even smaller and more elementary particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons. These particles give atoms their properties and, in turn, give elements their physical and chemical properties. 

Niels Bohr studied at the University of Copenhagen and earned a master of science degree in 1909 and a doctorate degree in 1911 (at the age of twenty-six). He then went to England and worked with Joseph John Thomson at Cambridge University and with Ernest Rutherford at Victoria University in Manchester. In 1914 Bohr returned to the University of Copenhagen, where, at the age of twenty-nine, he became an assistant professor of physics (he became a full professor in 1916 and held that post until 1956). Erom 1920 onward he was the director of the university s Institute for Theoretical Physics (renamed the Niels Bohr Institute in 1965). The institute became a focal center for theoretical physics for a generation. 

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