Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and
his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex,
England. James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland,
"to raise a little flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at
Spring Grove (now Brightwater), near Nelson, New Zealand. His first
name was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was
registered.
He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a
scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New
Zealand where he was president of the debating society, among other
things. After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of
research at the forefront of electrical technology, in 1895
Rutherford travelled to England for postgraduate study at the
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge (1895–1898),
and he briefly held the world record for the distance over which
electromagnetic waves could be detected.
In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to succeed Hugh Longbourne
Callendar in the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics at McGill
University in Montreal, Canada, where he did the work that gained
him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. In 1900 he gained a DSc
from the University of New Zealand. Also in 1900 he married Mary
Georgina Newton (1876–1945); they had one daughter, Eileen
Mary (1901–1930), who married Ralph Fowler. In 1907
Rutherford moved to Britain to take the chair of physics at the
University of Manchester.
He was knighted in 1914. In 1916 he was awarded the Hector
Memorial Medal. In 1919 he returned to the Cavendish as Director.
Under him, Nobel Prizes were awarded to Chadwick for discovering
the neutron (in 1932), Cockcroft and Walton for an experiment which
was to be known as splitting the atom using a particle accelerator,
and Appleton for demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere. He
was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1925 and raised to the
peerage as Baron Rutherford of Nelson, of Cambridge in the County
of Cambridge, in 1931, a title that became extinct upon his
unexpected death in hospital following an operation for an
umbilical hernia (1937). Since he was a peer, British protocol at
that time required that he be operated on by a titled doctor, and
the delay cost him his life. He is interred in Westminster Abbey,
alongside J. J. Thomson, and near Sir Isaac Newton.
--- Wikipedia
Until I read all the information at the Memorial recently, I had
kind of taken all of Rutherford's achievements lightly. This man is
indeed remarkable. He deserves another cache.