How did our Suberb get it's name?
Here Is what I think:
Ernest Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Nelson, New
Zealand, and many items bear Rutherford's name in honour of his
life and work
In 1899, during his reseaching of the magnetic properties of
iron exposed to high-frequency oscillations, he coined the terms
alpha and beta to describe the two distinct types of radiation
emitted by thorium and uranium. These rays were differentiated on
the basis of penetrating power.
In 1896, he invented a detector for electromagnetic waves and
worked on the behaviour of the ions observed in gases which had
been treated with X-ray.
In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to the chair of physics at
McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he demonstrated that
radioactivity was the spontaneous disintegration of atoms.
He noticed that a sample of radioactive material invariably took
the same amount of time for half the sample to decay
("half-life");and created a practical application using this
constant rate of decay as a clock, which could then be used to help
determine the age of the Earth, which turned out to be much older
than most of the scientists at the time believed.
This work that gained him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
1908.
Then, in conjunction with H. Geiger, a method of detecting a single
alpha particle and counting the number emitted from radium was
devised.
It was his interpretation of this experiment that led him to
formulate the Rutherford model of the atom in 1911- that a very
small positively charged nucleus was orbited by electrons.
In 1913, together with H. G. Moseley, he used cathode rays to
bombard atoms of various elements and showed that the inner
structures correspond with a group of lines which characterize the
elements. Each element could then be assigned an atomic number and,
more important, the properties of each element could be defined by
this number.
He was knighted in 1914 and died in Cambridge on October 19,
1937.
His ashes were buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, just west
of Sir Isaac Newton's tomb and by that of Lord Kelvin.