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Rutherford Mythology
This section started as addressing the mythology but has been expanded to include common errors, eg as
in Peerage, and claims which are suspect or worse.
Nobel Prize Work
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It is a very common myth in New Zealand that Ernest
Rutherford received a Nobel Prize for splitting the atom. He didn`t. That work was first
done in 1917, nearly a decade after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and 15 years after he
did the main work for which he received the prize. It is a particularly difficult myth to
eradicate. It even appears in an American university text (p1010 College Physics
by Serway and Faughn 3rd Edition 1991). But we cannot blame others. Our media, and even
Prime-Ministers, have been known to repeat the myth. Ernest Rutherford was
awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the
disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances." |
Correct Form of Address
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Sir Ernest Rutherford, when raised to the peerage,
became Lord Rutherford or Ernest Lord Rutherford. Lord Ernest Rutherford,
by which he is widely refered to in New Zealand, is incorrect. |
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Photograph of "Parents"
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This photograph, labelled as Rutherford`s parents, has been used as such in two books in New Zealand:
(Cox and Whittall, Rutherford - The Early Years (1991) and the booklet printed for the touring Rutherford exhibition
2000-2002.) Also it was in a national website until I discovered its use there in 2020. The couple in this photo are most certainly
not Ernest Rutherford`s parents, as should be obvious to anyone who has seen a photo of either parent, and are no relation
to Ernest Rutherford. After the first use I thought I had got this out of the system but apparently not.
This error came about in this way. The Nelson Provincial Museum houses an outstanding collection of glass negatives,
taken by early Nelson photographers. The photographer, or his employee, scratched the subject's name into the emulsion at the edge
of the plate. On development they wrapped each plate in paper and wrote in pencil the subject's name(s). This one is in the W E Brown
Collection (ref No 11079) taken in May 1868. It is labelled "Mr and Mrs Rutherford". That is correct. However it is not of Mr and
Mrs James Rutherford, Ernest's parents. I dont think it is of anyone related to the wider James Rutherford family. For completeness,
I must correctly identify this couple when I get the time.
I sure hope this photograph never again appears as such in any other book or publication. |
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"Rutherford a thug to women"
David Bodanis, in his book E = mc2 (New York, Walker, 2000), makes the outrageous
claim that with women Rutherford "was bluff and pretty much a thug." What
twaddle. In refuting this claim I am joined by four other biographers of the period who
well know Rutherford's character.
Bodanis`s book is a fast overview of a subject. He has taken one
reminiscence, Cecilia Payne`s, and presumably never saw all the evidence that, to the
contrary, Ernest Rutherford was a champion of women in science.
I think it a great shame that a popular author can, in seeking a
catchy phrase, malign someone who is worthy of better. This claim was first drawn to my
attention by a reporter who sought my reaction (which I gave emphatically together with
proof), yet the headline on the front page of the Weekend Herald (Auckland 6 Jan
2001) still read "Kiwi science legend 'sexist thug'."
The following letter, with minor additions added since, was sent to,
and declined by, Nature and Physics Today. because at that time they hadn't
reviewed the book.
The Editor, 5 Jan 2002.
Sir,
In his recent book E = mc2, David Bodanis makes an outrageous claim
about Ernest Rutherford, that "with women he was bluff and pretty much a thug."
This claim is nowhere near the truth, if not libellous.
Rutherford had an ex-schoolteacher mother, and he had six sisters
all of whom received a good education in New Zealand. Four of the ten University of New
Zealand Junior Scholarships awarded in 1889 were won by women. As a student at the
University of New Zealand's Canterbury College (1890-1894), he was brought up with women
students having the same rights as men because the college had fully accepted women as
equals from the day it opened in 1871. He tutored at least one female student, in
mathematics. His landlady, and future mother-in-law, was one of the stalwarts who ensured
New Zealand was the first country in the world to allow women the vote, in 1893, the year
that he too first appeared on the electoral roll. His wife marched with the suffragettes
in Britain before they belatedly won the vote.
His first research student was a woman, Harriet Brooks (McGill
University 1898). They remained lifelong friends, they had great respect for each other
and Rutherford wrote her obituary for Nature (17 June 1933). Rutherford had several other
women students including Fanny Gates, May Leslie and Elizabeth Karamichailova.
Bodanis has used only the reminiscence of Cecilia Payne, the only
woman in an advanced physics class at Cambridge, who took offence not only at having to
sit in the front row by herself (as the decorum of the day dictated) but also by
Rutherford opening each lecture with "Ladies and Gentlemen". It seems certain that Payne
misinterpreted a supportive gesture by Rutherford. At the time, lecturers at Cambridge
commonly addressed their classes as "Gentlemen" even when, as was often the case during
the First World War, the class was exclusively female. Thus to commence his lectures with
"Ladies and Gentlemen" can be seen as a deliberate provocative stance in support of the
presence of women in the lecture room.
There are several examples of Rutherford's vocal support for women's
rights, including the letter to The Times (8 Dec 1920) whereby Rutherford and the
professor of chemistry encouraged their fellow academics to give full rights to women at
Cambridge University. "...we welcome the presence of women in our laboratories ..."
It was not to be. Cambridge was a male dominated society which only granted women full rights
to the University in 1946, nine years after Rutherford's death in 1937, and the colleges
only became coeducational starting in 1972.
Majorie Stevenson told one of us (JAC) that as a young child she had sat on Rutherford's
knee. After telling her that she was a very determined little girl he had asked her to
promise him that she would become a scientist. And she did.
It is regrettable that Bodanis, in seeking a catchy comment, maligns
a person who in fact championed women in science and in higher education.
John Campbell (author, Rutherford Scientist Supreme),
University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
j.campbell@phys.canterbury.ac.nz
Lawrence Badash (author, Rutherford entry - Dictionary of National Biography (UK)),
University of California at Santa Barbara, USA.
badash@humanitas.ucsb.edu
Marelene Rayner-Canham and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham (authors, Harriet Brooks - Pioneer
Nuclear Scientist), Memorial University, Canada.
mrcanham@swgc.mun.ca grcanham@swgc.mun.ca
Jeff Hughes (historian of the nuclear period of the Cavendish Laboratory),
Manchester University, UK.
jeff.hughes@man.ac.uk
References
Bodanis, David. E=mc2 - A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation.
Macmillian, 2000, p176.
Katherine Haramundanis (Ed). Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. CUP, 1984, p118-9.
The Times 8 Dec 1920. (This letter is reproduced in part p381-382 Rutherford
Scientist Supreme.)
Phillips, A. ``Gentlemen'' - A Newnham Anthology. CUP, 1979, p120.
Cecilia's reminiscence (c1921) is "The advanced course in physics began with Rutherford's lectures.
I was the only women student who attended them and the regulations required that women should
sit by themselves in the front row. There had been a time when a chaperone was necessary but
mercifully that day was past. At every lecture would gaze at me pointedly, as I sat by myself
under his very nose, and would begin in his stentorian voice: 'Ladies and Gentleman'.
All the boys regularly greeted this witticism with thunderous applause, stamping with their
feet in the traditional manner, and at every lecture I wished I could sink into the earth.
To this day I instinctively take my place as far back as possible in a lecture room."
(JAC Examples of foot-stamping as the standard method of applauding can be heard in the
recordings of Rutherford's 1936 Lectures at Gottingen.)
Cecilia's remembrance of Rutherford would also be coloured by Eileen Rutherford, a
fellow Newnham College student but on the arts side, who once took Cecilia home for tea
and later reported to her that her father had said "She isn't interested in you,
my dear; she's interested in me." "I was outraged, for I was in fact very fond of her.
There may have been a grain of truth in his remark, nevertheless."
Cecilia, whose father died when she was 4 and was educated at all girls schools and Newnham College, Cambridge's
college for females, also states "I was still agonizingly shy, and quite unaccustomed to dealing with men."
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First Researches
First mentioned in Eve`s book of 1939, it is often claimed that Rutherford started
research in his fifth year (1894) at Canterbury College. This is not so. He was an
accomplished researcher by the end of his 4th year (1893), because of research needed
before sitting his MA papers. This area is well covered in Rutherford
Scientist Supreme. Rutherford left New Zealand after two years research at the
forefront of the electrical technology of the day. His brilliance as an experimentalist
was already evident.
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Wireless Signalling in New Zealand
The Rutherford-Marconi Magnetic Detector of wireless signals
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It is often claimed that Ernest Rutherford did
wireless signalling before he left New Zealand. He did not. The claim comes from a 1923
reminiscence of the biology master at Christchurch Boys' High School but there is no
supporting contemporary evidence and all the contemporary evidence says otherwise, as did
Ern at the end of his 3rd paper. His New Zealand research is covered in Chapters 6 and 7 of
Rutherford Scientist Supreme and I summarise the
evidence in the interlude (pps 204-6).
At Canterbury Ern was determining whether or not iron was magnetic at very high frequencies.
As part of this work he developed a magnetic detector of very fast current pulses in circuits and he did use
a Hertzian Oscillator to produce damped pulses of shorter duration than he could produce using his timing device.
It was only after he had been at Cambridge for two months (late 1895) that he embarked on wireless
signalling by taking his magnetic detector of very short current pulses from the oscillator circuit of the Hertz
oscillator and placed it in the detector part of the Hertz oscillator. He did this initially to test how sensitive
his magnetic detector was.
The first known wireless signalling experiments in New Zealand were those of J S S Cooper at
Canterbury College in 1899. |
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Splitting the Atom
The unofficial banner
to mark Ern`s Presidency of the BAAS meeting at Liverpool, 1923.
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There is a lot of confusion over this term.
"Splitting the nucleus" would be less confusing as "splitting the
atom" has a messy background. The atom was unknowingly split when
people first made chemical reactions (because that often involves the transfer of
electrons from one atom to another), when physicists first made electrical discharges in
gases and when scientists first demonstrated electrolysis. JJ Thomson demonstrated the
first evidence of the existence of bodies smaller than the atom when he discovered the
electron in 1897. Ernest Rutherford spent two years helping JJ with experiments on the
conduction of electricity in gas discharges so was an instant convert to bodies smaller
than atoms. By 1902 Rutherford had shown that radioactivity was atoms spontaneously
decaying into other species with the emission of particles, ie some heavy atoms split
spontaneously.
Ernest Rutherford was the first person to knowingly split the nucleus, in
1918 at Manchester University where he bombarded nitrogen with naturally occurring alpha
particles from radioactive material and observed a proton emitted with energy higher than
the alpha particle. (The nitrogen had been converted to hydrogen plus (as shown later) an
unknown isotope of oxygen.) The reaction is shown on the New Zealand 7c stamp of 1971.
(See this stamp under Honouring Ern.)
New Zealanders usually state that Ernest Rutherford is most well known for
splitting the atom. However they usually have in mind the 1932 event when Cockcroft and
Walton, working under Rutherford`s direction, first split the nucleus by entirely
artificial means, using a particle accelerator to bombard lithium with protons thereby
producing two alpha particles.
Induced radioactivity was discovered by the Joliot-Curies who fired alpha
particles at stable nuclei. These combined to produce unstable nuclei which later decayed.
Americans, particularly near Chicago, often attribute "splitting the
atom" to Enrico Fermi and have a memorial to say so.
In 1920 Rutherford predicted that an uncharged particle (the neutron) of
similar mass to the proton had to exist, and that being uncharged it could easily penetrate
into atomic nuclei. Fermi verified this. In
1939 Hahn and Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and claimed to produce an atom
chemically similar to barium. Lise Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, explained this
as the uranium nucleus splitting into two roughly equal halves with the emission of
several neutrons, the basis for the chain reaction which gave rise to nuclear power and bombs.
The atom bomb should have been called the nuclear bomb, because it depends
on the rearrangement of nuclear particles. Traditional bombs could then have been called
atomic bombs as their chemical reactions depend on rearranging combinations of atoms and
ions, a process about a million times less energetic than a nuclear rearrangement.
In Physics In Canada 67(1) 139 2011 is a letter to the editor on this topic with my response. |
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Recent Claims that Rutherford Didn't Split the Atom in 1919
These claims are ludicrous. He did so as reported in his 1919 paper. He turned nitrogen into hydrogen.
In Canada he had observed, in anything other than a vacuum, small angle
scattering of alpha particles so when he went to Manchester he had Geiger (small angle) and Marsden (large angle) make accurate
measurements of the scattering (1909). Two years later (1911) he used this scattering to prove his atomic nuclear model.
He then switched to bombarding light atoms (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) with alpha particles.
He knew on energy grounds that the alpha had reached a distance from the nucleus which was very small
compared with the diameter of an atom but still some distance from the nucleus. He and his team
would be able to approach much closer to a light nucleus, as its electrical charge was far less
than the heavier atoms (e.g. H = 1 unit charge, Gold = 94 unit charge.) That way he had a better
chance of interacting with the nucleus.
Classical momentum calculations showed these light hydrogen particles would recoil
with a speed 1.6 times that of the incident alpha. They had 4 times the range
in air compared to the incident alpha. This was because the H nucleus was some 4 times less
massive, and only half the charge, of the alpha nucleus. So he and his team were quite used to
observing recoiling Hydrogen "atoms" (nuclei) of great range.
The ranges of Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen were much less and
dependant on their mass. Rutherford and Marsden often observed the long range H particles from these gases
but impurity atoms (e.g. water vapour absorbed onto samples etc) couldn't be ruled out.
World War I intervened. In 1917 his war work on how to detect a submerged
submarine (see Navy Today WW1 Supplement, 83 p7-11 2003 or Physics World Feb 32-36 2016)
was taken over by especialist government laboratories. Hence he could return to his researches,
aided only by a technician as all the young men were at the war. By December 1917 he wrote
to Niels Bohr in neutral Denmark “I am also trying to break up the atom by this method –
Regard this as private.”
He observed that when he fired his alpha particles into pure nitrogen, long-range
H particles were emitted. He had discovered the proton (the nucleus of the H atom) and that it had to
be part of the nitrogen nucleus. He had split the atom, had induced the first nuclear reaction artificially,
and became the world's first successful alchemist. He had changed nitrogen into hydrogen.
Rutherford waited until the war was over before submitting (April 1919) his four research
papers as he prepared to shift to head the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Collisions of Alpha
Particles with Light Atoms IV. An Anomalous Effect in Nitrogen. Phil Mag6 xxxvii 581 1919.
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The Ease with which Rutherford Obtained Scholarships
Too often people writing about Rutherford uncritically repeat a statement written about him
by early biographers who knew him in later life. But as there have been some 50 biographies since
the first, a few more well-researched ones are worthy of consultation for up-to-date knowledge.
Arthur Eve's excellent 1937 first official biography of Rutherford, states that Rutherford
"had no difficulty in obtaining scholarships and prizes." This has recently been repeated by
Cecilia Jarlskog in her paper on Rutherford's Nobel Prize (CERN Courier December 2008).
The truth is quite different.
Eve knew Rutherford from when he was a distinguished scientist until death,
and is guilty, as are so many, of projecting Rutherford's genius back into his
childhood without checking. As I am the only person to have studied Rutherford's development
in New Zealand, the details are in my book.
The essence is that Rutherford took two goes at any scholarship he ever got,
from primary school to secondary school (1885 and 1886 when, had Edward Paisley not crashed
in English, Rutherford would never have received that one), from secondary school to the
University of New Zealand (on his first attempt in 1888 he passed matriculation but not
high enough on the list for a scholarship to pay fees so he stayed an extra year at
secondary school, as many did, for another attempt in 1889), and from University to
overseas scholarship (he was ranked 2nd of the two candidates who applied for nomination
for the one biennial Exhibition of 1851 Science Scholarship available to New Zealand
graduates, but the top candidate withdrew leaving Rutherford as the only nomination for 1895).
At Canterbury College it is true that Rutherford received the undergraduate Maths
prize every year (1890-92). However, the record shows that in his first year he shared it
with Willie Marris (a classicist and later governor of Assam), and in the second and third
years he was beaten by, then equal with, Marris but it was awarded to Rutherford because
a student could only hold one scholarship and Marris also won the classics scholarship
so took that. It should not be overlooked that there were only 4 or 5 applicants each year,
only two of whom were serious.
Rutherford obtained his early prizes and scholarships through hard work and
perseverance, not natural brilliance.
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The Ship on Which the Rutherford Family Arrived in New Zealand
Arthur Eve's excellent 1937 first official biography of Rutherford, states
incorrectly that the Rutherford family arrived in New Zealand on the Phoebe Dunbar. The fact
is that the Phoebe Dunbar was built seven years after the Rutherford's arrived.
I thought I had eliminated this error but it has recently been repeated by Richard
Reeves in his biography of Rutherford A Force of Nature (Atlas Books, 2008). Biographers
should always also consult recent books which have been well researched.
The details are in my book Rutherford's Ancestors (ch 2 and p26).
The Rutherford's arrived in Nelson on the 29th of March 1843 on the ship Phoebe. In 1849
the Phoebe was wrecked on the coast of India. Her owner, Duncan Dunbar, had a replacement
ship built, the Phoebe Dunbar, which he had also named after his wife.
So biographers beware. In Eve's first paragraph of 9 lines there are 7 errors
or points that require explanation.
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