OUR GREATEST MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 168, 17 July 1924, Page 5

OUR GREATEST MAN.

SIR ERNEST RUTHERFORD. OBTAINS FRANKLIN MEDAL. A DISTINGUISHED CAREER. 3y Cable.—Press Association.— Copriig'lt.) (Received 12.30 p.m.) LONDON, July 16. Sir Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand scientist of world-wide repute, has been awarded the Franklin Medal, it was presented at the Foreign Office. Mr. C. P. Trevelyn (Minister of Education I. in presenting to Sir E. Rutherford the Franklin Medal, said Sir K. Rutherford was the greatest living experimentalist. This honour cave the Mother Country particular pleasure, for it honoured one of the Dominions.— (A. and X.Z. Cable.) I\ J. N, has the following about New Zealand's greatest man: — The Franklin Medal is a very high honour. It is awarded by the Franklin Institute. Twenty-five years ago. in Canterbury College, New Zealand, a struggling student burned the midnight, oil when prosecuting, in a laboratory only insufficiently equipped, his early studies in the fields of chemistry and physics. To-day this student, Ernest Rutherford, has won fame as one of the leading authorities of the world on the subject of radio-activity, he has gained distinction after distinction from scientific organisations in the four quarters of the globe, and, as a cable message in Monday's issue of "The Sun" informed us, lie has received the highest scientilic appointment of the English speaking .world —that of Cavendish Professor of Physicsat Cambridge University. Rutherford's has been a life, of hard work, and at the same time of dazzling achievement. So hampered was he in the beginning of his science studies in New Zealand by the want of suitable apparatus for research purposes that he and Professor BicKerton—who was then directing his studies—were obliged to fit up a den of their own in order to amplify their investigations. Yet this very handicap may have acted as a stimulus to Rutherford's originality and resourcefulness. It was in these days of stress that he prepared the brilliant paper on Hertzian waves, which won him the research scholarship in Bcience offered periodically to the Xew Zealand University by the commissioners of the 1851 Exhibition. To work out this scholarship he went to Cambridge, to Trinity College. He continued at Cambridge, tinder Sir J. J. Thomson, his researches in the field he had marked out for himself. Meanwhile, in a laboratory at the back of an unpretentious villa on the outskirts of the city of Paris, a French scientist and his wife had begun the elaborate researches which were to make their names illustrious. Mme. Curie, struck by the results of Henri Becquerel's experiments concerning the i radio-activity of uranium, proposed to her husband the plan of investigation which led to the discovery of that marvellous element radium. This discovery of radium was announced in 1898, the year Eutherford left Cambridge to become Professor of Physics at MeGill .University, Montreal. Five years later he published his book "Radio-Activity," in which, as Professor Laby, of New Zealand, has so aptly pointed out, he has not merely extended the boundaries of knowledge on this subject, but annexed a whole province. This was the great field, he had marked for exploration, and what he has accomplished in it constitutes one of the most distinguished, as well as one of the I most fascinating chapters of the history iof contemporary science. 1 It was Rutherford who, with Frederi ick Soddy, carried out the long series of experiments at the MeGill University, which established the theory of atomic disintergration in explanation of radio- ; activity—a theory not only capable, | Soddy explains, of interpreting all the very complicated known facts of this property of radium, but also of predicting and *«<ounting for many new ones. It is to Rutherford that the world owes the greater part of its knowledge of the new gas produced from radium —a gas intensely radio-active, which he has named "the emanation." Soddy, in his interesting book "The Interpretation of Radium," narrates the experiment, first performed by Rutherford and himself in Montreal in November, 1902, by which the quality of this emanation as a true gas was demonstrated. It was Rutherford who performed the first analysis of the radiations emitted b yeach of the radio elementsuranium, thorium, and radium—classing the rays into three main types, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, and distinguishing the remarkably varied penetrating power of the three in a series of extremely interesting experiments with sheets of paper and metal. It was Rutherford who, with Dr. Geiger, achieved the feat of counting directly the number af Alpha rays expelled from a given quantity of radium every second. It was Rutherford who conducted the exhaustive researches into the properties of thorium, showing incidentally that it, like radium, possessed the power of endowing neighbouring objects with some of its own radioactivity. It was he who originally predicted that helium would be one of the ultimate productions of the disintegration of uranium, radium, and thorium —a prediction since abundantly verified. In recognition of the brilliancy of his investigations, Rutherford has received many honours. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1903, awarded the Rumford Medal, and invited to deliver the Bakerian lecture in 1904. Then in March, 1908. the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin awarded him the Bressa Prize, which is valued at £1200, and is given every 10 years for some important discovery or research in physics, geography, history, or other studies. It was won by M. Pasteur in 188 S. In November, 190G, Professor Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. He was knighted in 1918.