The nuclear option

A well-researched biography of our first Nobel laureate explores Ernest Rutherford's achievements in plain language.

- BY JENNY NICHOLLS

Ernest Rutherford is so revered for his scientific achievements that a potato masher he made for his granny is part of the collection of the UK's Royal Society, which sells posters of it for £17.95. The great man carved the masher in 1888, as a teenager. By the time he died in 1937, he was one of the world's most famous scientists.

Rutherford was the first Nobel laureate from Oceania, a hereditary peer (Baron Rutherford of Nelson), and was honoured in the naming of the radioactive mineral Rutherfordine and element Rutherfordium.

Did he deserve so many accolades? Yes, says Wellington historian and writer Matthew Wright, in a well-researched biography that explores Rutherford's achievements in plain language.

Barely a decade after carving the masher Rutherford was professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, launching investigations that would go on to underpin much of the technology of modern life.

For his work in describing radiation and splitting the atom – in the process changing one element into another – Rutherford was called "the first true alchemist", "the greatest experimental scientist since Michael Faraday" and "the father of nuclear physics". It was Rutherford who came up with the terms "alpha rays", "beta rays", "protons", the atomic "nucleus" and radioactive "half-life".

The one tribute that Rutherford never got was a great biographer, a Janet Browne or Graham Farmelo. This despite the riches of The Rutherford Collection in the Alexander Turnbull Library: a trove of letters and interviews compiled after Rutherford's death by his student Ernest Marsden (the man the beleaguered Marsden Fund is named after).