Number wise, New Zealanders are among the smallest collection of people on earth. But historically, we've changed the world with our ideas. Over the next few weeks in Independent Women we will be looking at female Kiwis who should be a source of inspiration for us all. These heroes are proudly brought to you by THE NEW ZEALAND EDGE, a website dedicated to a new way of thinking about our identity, our people, our stories, our achievements and our place in the world.
The creator of modern atomic physics and forerunner of the nuclear age, one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and a baronetcy, choosing the title Baron Rutherford of Nelson, in 1931. In the words of Einstein, "a second Newton". The man who "tunnelled into the very material of God": inventor, experimenter and Nelson farm boy.
Rutherford’s strengths as a scientist are legend. He attributed his willingness to experiment and find unorthodox solutions to his hardscrabble background in rural New Zealand: "We don’t have the money, so we have to think".
Three Discoveries
Ernest Rutherford’s three major discoveries shaped modern science, created nuclear physics and changed the way that we envisage the structure of the atom today.
Rutherford’s first discovery was that elements are not immutable, but can change their structure naturally, changing from heavy elements to slightly lighter elements. This led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 at the age of 37, for his work on the transmutation of elements and the chemistry of radioactive material.
His second discovery, the nuclear model of the atom, became the basis for how we see the atom today: a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons.
He built on this discovery for his third great achievement, the splitting of the atom, making him, as John Campbell says in his biography of Rutherford in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, "the world’s first successful alchemist".
Counting The Beats
Ernest Rutherford was born in Brightwater, near Nelson, New Zealand, in 1871, the fourth child and second son of 12 children, to James Rutherford, a mechanic, wheelwright, engineer, flax-miller and farmer and his wife, Martha Thompson, a school teacher before her marriage. Both parents were keen that their children gain an education, and were supporters of the small local schools where Ernest and his brothers and sisters began their schooling. Martha ensured the Rutherford children completed their homework with the dictum, "All knowledge is power."
From an early age Ernest was distinguished at school for his arithmetical abilities and his scientific curiosity, both qualities encouraged by his early teachers at the local Nelson schools, Ernest's early education, gained at school, from his family and from exploring the local farms and countryside with his siblings, awakened his interest in science and the keen skills of observation that are essential for all scientific minds. A school science text-book told of a method for determining the distance of an enemy's canon, a method which Ernest adapted to local surroundings during an electrical storm at Foxhill.
"James Rutherford, who had got out of bed to check on the storm, was surprised, more so when he heard his son talking to himself softly.
" ‘Ernest, what’s up, my boy?’ he called out.
" ‘I’m counting,’ the boy called back.
" ‘Counting?’
" There was a rumble of thunder which shook the house.
" ‘Yes. If you count the seconds between the flash and the thunder clap and allow 1,200 feet for each second for the sound to travel, you can tell how close you are to the storm centre.’ "
Appropriately, Ernest's first recorded illicit experiment was a canon constructed from the brass tube of a hat-peg with a marble for a ball and a dose of gunpowder to ignite the device. Not the best example of Rutherford's experimental savvy, the resulting explosion failed to hit the target twenty metres away, but succeeded in destroying the structure.
The Rutherfords were a close knit family, gathering around the family piano to sing songs; forging a farming life with few amenities in a still isolated and rugged landscape. Though at Havelock two of Ernest’s brothers drowned in a childhood accident and another brother died as an infant, the life of the Rutherford siblings was also filled with the curiosity-satiating distractions of growing up in the New Zealand outdoors and the stimulus of farm-life: poaching eggs from bird-nests, orchard raiding, swimming in the Wai-iti river, shooting Kereru pigeons fat from feeding on berries, calculating spill-ponds for the farm.
Making enough of a living to feed the family was a struggle at times. At Foxhill, James Rutherford ran a farm and flax-mill, and at Pelorous, where the family moved in 1883, he ran another flax-mill and in 1885 turned to saw-milling, manufacturing railway sleepers for the Government, at one time winning a contract to supply 400,000 sleepers. However due to an economic downturn his contract was cancelled (while he was recovering from an accident which left him with five broken ribs) and he had to leave the family to look for new opportunity in the North Island. He founded a steam driven flax-mill in Pungarehu, Taranaki, employing twenty people, where he moved the family in 1888.
In the school holidays Ernest busied himself with farm chores, helping out at his father’s farm or mill. Ernest distinguished himself from his earliest days at school, but it took two attempts for him to win an education board scholarship to higher education, following his older brother George to Nelson College. For children of less than wealthy parents these were one of the few options available with which to obtain further learning. Ernest attended Nelson College as a boarder for three years, where he was dux, and came under the tuition of the master William Littlejohn, who taught him mathematics and elementary science. In addition to his academic prowess he was also head boy and played in the rugby First XV team as a forward.
He topped his class in every subject in his final year and won one of ten nationwide Junior Scholarships though again only after applying for a second time. In 1890 he enrolled at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand (now University of Canterbury). At Canterbury College he continued to play rugby and took part in the student Dialectic Society (a debating club) and the Science Society.
Early Experiments
While still an undergraduate, Rutherford’s genius for experimentation began to blossom. His early research showed that it was possible for iron to be magnetized by high frequency currents, a discovery that went against the prevailing scientific opinion of the day.
In 1894 he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in geology and chemistry and in 1895 was awarded an Exhibition of 1851 Science Research Scholarship and he elected to work as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory.
At Nelson College and Canterbury College Ernest had been a merely excellent student, but it wasn't until the move to Cambridge on a scholarship designed to benefit young graduates from the outposts of Empire (Rutherford was amongst the first "foreign" students to be admitted to Cambridge.)
Family anecdote recalls that Ernest was on the farm working when he received news of the scholarship: "That's the last potato I will ever dig" he remarked.
Dissecting The Atom
In 1907 Rutherford began a debate with physicist Antoine Becquerel on how alpha particles, reacted when they were ejected from radioactive material. Discovering that alpha particles tended to bounce off air molecules, he surmised that there had to be something at the centre of atoms to deflect them. He tested his assumptions by bouncing alpha particles off a sheet of gold leaf and determined that the most powerful part of an atom was a very small, hard, core at its centre, a central electric charge concentrated at a point - the nucleus. This was surrounded by a cloud of electrons made up of an opposing electrical charge, the alpha and beta particles.
This concept of opposite charges which, as David Eliot Brody and Arnold R Brody noted, "marks the beginning of the modern understanding of the structure of the atom", was Rutherford’s second great discovery. As Campbell says, "the nuclear model of the atom had been born".
This orbiting model was the most revolutionary idea of Rutherford’s career. During World War I Rutherford worked on acoustic methods of detecting submarines and developed several new technologies. He then drew on a lifetime’s strengths in practical experimentation for the third great breakthrough of his career.
Although the different components of the atom had already been identified, it was still accepted that the atom was, as the derivation of the word (from the Greek tomos, to cut and a meaning not, therefore something unsplittable) implies, an indissoluble unit. Rutherford set out to prove this assumption wrong. He split the atom in 1917 (reported in 1919), when, as McLauchlan writes, "he detected the transmutation of one elementary material, nitrogen, into another, oxygen, which was induced artificially when the nitrogen atom was bombarded by the natural alpha articles of radium."
Rutherford's first discovery had swept away accepted models of the stable atom, altered the course of modern science and made possible the development of nuclear physics. Again Rutherford's demonstrations had changed the way we viewed and conceived of the world. However, Rutherford’s reaction to his achievement was typical of his understated style: it was, he said, like "playing with marbles".
Number wise, New Zealanders are among the smallest collection of people on earth. But historically, we've changed the world with our ideas. Over the next few weeks in Independent Women we will be looking at female Kiwis who should be a source of inspiration for us all. These heroes are proudly brought to you by THE NEW ZEALAND EDGE, a website dedicated to a new way of thinking about our identity, our people, our stories, our achievements and our place in the world. 
The creator of modern atomic physics and forerunner of the nuclear age, one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and a baronetcy, choosing the title Baron Rutherford of Nelson, in 1931. In the words of Einstein, "a second Newton". The man who "tunnelled into the very material of God": inventor, experimenter and Nelson farm boy.