Ernest Rutherford was born on 30 August 1871 in Nelson, New Zealand, the son of a farmer. In 1894 he won a scholarship to Cambridge University and worked as a research student under Sir Joseph Thomson. In 1898 he became Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. There, working with chemist Frederick Soddy, he investigated the newly-discovered phenomenon of radioactivity. Rutherford and Soddy proposed that radioactivity results from the disintegration of atoms.

In 1907 Rutherford returned to England to become Professor of Physics at Manchester University. In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1914 he was knighted, but the war interrupted his work. He helped to develop methods of dealing with the new menace of submarine warfare, as well as studying underwater acoustics.

In 1917 he returned to physics and a long series of experiments in which he discovered that the nuclei of certain light elements, such as nitrogen, could be 'disintegrated' by the impact of energetic alpha particles coming from some radioactive source, and that during this process fast protons were emitted. This was the first artificially induced nuclear reaction. Rutherford had virtually created a new discipline, the nuclear physics.