Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908

Ernest Rutherford

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908 was awarded to Ernest Rutherford "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".

Ernest Rutherford, physicist, who became a Nobel laureate for his pioneering work in nuclear physics and for his theory of the structure of the atom.
Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand, and was educated at the University of New Zealand and the University of Cambridge. He was professor of physics at McGill University in Montréal, Quebec, from 1898 to 1907 and at the University of Manchester in England during the following 12 years. After 1919 he was professor of experimental physics and director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and also held a professorship, after 1920, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.
Rutherford was one of the first and most important researchers in nuclear physics. Soon after the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 by the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel, Rutherford identified the three main components of radiation and named them alpha, beta, and gamma rays. He also showed that alpha particles are helium nuclei. His study of radiation led to his formulation of a theory of atomic structure, which was the first to describe the atom as a dense nucleus about which electrons circulate in orbits (see Atom and Atomic Theory).
In 1919 Rutherford conducted an important experiment in nuclear physics when he bombarded nitrogen gas with alpha particles and obtained atoms of an oxygen isotope and protons. This transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen was the first artificially induced nuclear reaction. It inspired the intensive research of later scientists on other nuclear transformations and on the nature and properties of radiation. Rutherford and the British physicist Frederick Soddy developed the explanation of radioactivity that scientists accept today. The rutherford, a unit of radioactivity was named in his honor.
Rutherford was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1903 and served as president of that institution from 1925 to 1930. He was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry, was knighted in 1914, and was made a baron in 1931. He died in London on October 19, 1937, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His writings include Radioactivity (1904); Radiations from Radioactive Substances (1930), which he wrote with British physicists Sir James Chadwick and Charles Drummond Ellis, and which has become a standard text; and The Newer Alchemy (1937).


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