LORD RUTHERFORD

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 96, 20 October 1937, Page 14

LORD RUTHERFORD

DEATH IN LONDON GREAT PHYSICIST NELSON'S FAMOUS SON (Culled Press Association— By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.) (Received October 20, 1.45 p.m.) LONDON, October 19. Lord Rutherford of Nelson is dead. Ernest, Baron Rutherford, was borri at Spring Grove, now called Brightwater, Nelson, in August, 1871. When he was only ' five ' years of age 'he ii inily removed from Spring Grove ( .o Foxhill, Nelson, and a few years afterwards shifted to Havelock, Marlborough. At the Havelock School he won a scholarship which enabled him to attend Nelson College as a boarder. In 1889 he won a junior university scholarship, which allowed him to commence his university career at Canterbury University College. It was probably about this time that the following incident is said to have occurred. He was on a visit to his parents, then living at Pungarehu, Taranaki. He was digging potatoes in the garden when hij mother brought him the news of his success in winning

a scholarship; Oir hearing it he threw down the spade. and said, laughingly, "That's the last potato I'll dig." In four years at Canterbury College he attained the highest academic honours, obtaining his Master of Arts degree with double first-class honours in mathematics and physics. The University authorities awarded him the! 1851 Exhibition Scholarship, and so, I early in 1895, he proceeded to England to study at Cambridge University. At Cambridge he worked under Sir J J. Thomson, at that time Cavendish Professor, who was held to be the most distinguished mathematical physicist in Europe, taking - his B.A. research degree in 1897. He was appointed professor of. physics at McGill University, Montreal, in 1898. He. was elected a Fellow of the Royal' Society in 1893, and became professor of physics at Manchester in 1907. In recognition of his work he was knighted in 1914; and in 1919. he succeeded. Sir J. J. Thomson as Cavendish professor. In 1920 he was appointed Professor of Physics at the Royal Institution, but still retained the Cavendish Professorship. . In 1920 he had. conferred upon' him the Order of Merit, a very high and exclusive honour and nevei conferred except for most distinguished service either military or civil, and limited to twenty-four members in the whole of the Empire. Amongst other honours won by Sir Ernest Rutherford may be mentioned the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society, the Copley Medal, and the Nobel Prize for chem istry ih 1908. He was president of the British Association in 1923 and of thp Royal Society in 1925. He also was awarded the Barnard Medal in 1910. the Franklin Medal in 1924, the Albert Medal in 1928, the Faraday Medal in 1930, the Sidey Medal in 1935, the Bressa Prize from the Turin Academy of Science in 1908, and honorary degrees from the leading universities in England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada,: the United States. His portrait was purchased by the Royal Society in 1932. Since last year he had been director of the Mond Laboratory established by the Royal- Society at Cambridge, and he was Professor of Natural Philosophy of the Royal Institution and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research since 1930. His peerage dated from 1931, and he married, in 1900, Miss Mary Newton, but there is no heir to the barony. His daughter, Eileen Mary, who married R. H. Fowler, died in 1930. HiS WORK DESCRIBED. His work really falls into three periods. In the first he attacked a novel and complicated phenomenon qualitatively and quantitatively. The inhabitants. of the new country of radioactivity were measured besides being identified. Seven years after the discovery of radioactivity he was able to give, in conjunction with Soddy, the theory of spontaneous atomic disintegration which provided the complete interpretation of the known facts and the basis for all subsequent research. This first period of Lord Rutherford's career closed with his departure from Montreal for Manchester in 1907, and his reception of the Nobel Prize 17 1908. He was then thirty-seven years old, and had completed what might legitimately have been regarded as a life-work. The second period o* his career was spent in Manchester between 1907 and 1919. This proved even greater than the first. While at Manchester he worked out the nuclear theory of the atom. Once more nis conceptual originality was decisive, foi he had to adopt a model for the atom which could not work according to accepted mechanical principles. He proved experimentally that the atom must be a roomy structure in which nearly all of the mass was concentrated in a tiny central nucleus. This was the key to what is named atomic physics. By this time Rutherford had attracted research students from many lands. Among them was Moseley, who discovered that the number oi elements must be limited He was killed in the World War at the age of twenty-eight. It is said that he was the most brilliant experimental physicist of his own age. There were Hans Geiger. whose instrument for detecting and counting the passage of charged particles is now so universally applied, Darwin, Chadwick, and others. But, most remarkable of all, there was Niels Bohr. The student of the history of science reflects with never-ending excitement on the destiny that brought together in Manchester) the master experimenter from New j Zealand, and the theoretical genius | from Denmark. In 1914 Manchester University had Rutherford as professor and Bohr as lecturer in physics. Rutherford had provided the mode) for'the atom, and Bohr gave the mechanics by which it could work.

Armed with the Rutherford-Bohr conception of the atom, physicists started a campaign, which still advances with unabated triumph, on the investigation of matter. The third period of Lord Rutherford's career began as Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge in 1919. He had already completed .two great periods of fundamental research, and an easing of the investigatory pressure might reasonably have been expectcd. But in 1919 he announced that he had accomplished the first artificial disintegration of an atom. He was the first to arrange the transmutation of an element. After this he began a detailed study of the structure of the atomic nucleus. For a number of years new knowledge was accumulated without any striking discovery. The fire seemed to have settled a little. Then in 1932 came the announcement from the Cavendish Laboratory of the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick. A few weeks later Cockroft and Walton announced the first disintegration of. an atom by a machine of human construction, and a few months later Blackett announced that he had definitely confirmed the discovery of the positive electron by Anderson of Pasadena. The third period has proved the equal of the first and of the second. In person he was a tall, heavily-built man, who at first sight looked more like a gentleman farmer than a scientific genius. His eyes, however—shrewd, calm, and penetrating—gave the careful observer an indication of the power and orginality of the man. He was an excellent speaker, with a gift of clear] exposition and a hearty wit. He visited; New Zealand about 1925.