What kind of work did rutherford do

He was not done with the puzzles of the decay families of thorium, radium, etc. Boltwood and Hahn both worked with Rutherford in Manchester, Boltwood in — and Hahn in — That is, he was leaving radio-chemistry to others and turning to physics. Rutherford's early team at Manchester included Geiger and William Kay — , junior laboratory assistant since Rutherford promoted Kay to laboratory steward in , to manage lab equipment and to aid him in his research. In , Kay thought back to his youth with Rutherford in an interview.

The language is quaint, but the description is as close to Rutherford's approach as we get. The questioner was Samuel Devons — , who was one of Rutherford's last students in the s. We used to, I used to set up nearly all his apparatus. You know, when he did his work, you know, oftener than not, he used to tell me and we did a rough experiment, re It gives you And then we would do a rough experiment, and get one or two curves you see, and then straight away button it on to somebody else to do the real work, and that's how he did his They observed these through a microscope and counted the scintillations at different angles of dispersion.

The instrument, which evolved into the "Geiger counter," had a partially evacuated metal cylinder with a wire down its center. They applied a voltage between the cylinder and the wire high enough almost to spark. These then collided with other molecules and produced more ions, and so on. Geiger and Rutherford published several articles in and on these methods and their use. Geiger is a good man and worked like a slave. I could never have found time for the drudgery before we got things going in good style.

Finally all went well, but the scattering is the devil. Our tube worked like a charm and we could easily get a throw of 50 mm. Geiger is a demon at the work of counting scintillations and could count at intervals for a whole night without disturbing his equanimity. I damned vigorously and retired after two minutes. Quoted in Eve, p. One kind of experiment was not enough. One kind of detector was not enough. He wanted more proof. So he needed a new line of attack.

The new line was very simple, a chemical procedure mixed with physics. For this work Rutherford recruited Thomas Royds — , who had earned his Physics Honours degree in They studied the emitted light in a spectroscope and found it to be identical to the spectrum of helium. Within a few months, Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances.

Rutherford next turned his attention to using them to probe the atom. The autumn of began an important series of researches. Geiger thought Ernest Marsden — , a year-old student in Honours Physics, was ready to help on these experiments and suggested it to Rutherford.

Since Rutherford often pushed third-year students into research, saying this was the best way to learn about physics, he readily agreed. Geiger and Marsden began with small-angle dispersion and tried various thicknesses of foils, seeking mathematical relationships between dispersion and thickness of foil or number of atoms traversed.

Marsden later recalled that Rutherford said to him amidst these experiments: "See if you can get some effect of alpha-particles directly reflected from a metal surface. Rutherford was ever ready to meet the unexpected and exploit it, where favourable, but he also knew when to stop on such excursions. Birks, , p. This was Rutherford's playful approach in action.

His students and others tried out his ideas, many of which were dead-ends. Rutherford wrote:. Experiment, directed by the disciplined imagination either of an individual or, still better, of a group of individuals of varied mental outlook, is able to achieve results which far transcend the imagination alone of the greatest philosopher.

Quoted in Eve, , Frontmatter. Sometime later in or , Marsden said, he reported his results to Rutherford. Rutherford recalled this a little differently:. I remember It was almost incredible as if you fired a inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

Rutherford , , p. Human memory is fallible. Whether Marsden or Geiger told Rutherford, the effect was the same. Rutherford said they should prepare a publication from this research, which they submitted in May Moreover, this started Rutherford thinking toward what ultimately, almost two years later, he published as a theory of the atom. What was Rutherford doing for the rest of and all of ? For one thing, his close friend Boltwood was in Manchester for the academic year working with Rutherford on radioactive decay products of radium.

He was also reviewing and speaking on earlier ideas about atomic structure. Even the neutron, discovered by James Chadwick, owes its name to Rutherford. The exponential equation used to calculate the decay of radioactive substances was first employed for that purpose by Rutherford and he was the first to elucidate the related concepts of the half-life and decay constant.

With Frederick Soddy at McGill University, Rutherford showed that elements such as uranium and thorium became different elements i. At the time, such an incredible idea was not to be mentioned in polite company: it belonged to the realm of alchemy, not science.

For this work, Rutherford won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. This was the first artificially induced nuclear reaction. Rutherford had virtually created a new discipline, that of nuclear physics. In , Rutherford became professor of experimental physics and director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, succeeding Thomson. Many of his students at the Cavendish Laboratory went on to become pioneering scientists. From to he was president of the Royal Society to which he had been elected in In he was awarded a life peerage and died on 19 October He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

In , the 'rutherford', a unit of radioactivity, was named in his honour. Search term:.