Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) Ernest Rutherford was born in Nelson, New Zealand. Rutherford demonstrated his abilities as a scientist early on while working on his B.Sc. at the University of New Zealand in 1894. He showed that the magnetization can be removed from a magnetized iron needle by dissolving the surface layer of the metal in acid. He began work at Cambridge in 1895 and was a professor at the University of Manchester from 1907 on. It is …showed first 75 words of 361 total…

…showed last 75 words of 361 total…be 34000. Before Rutherford, the smallest particle of matter was represented as a solid ball. Rutherford's experiments with the decay of radioactive elements caused him to think in terms of a more definite structure. He observed that the disintegration of elements was accompanied by emissions of positive helium and of negative particles of almost no mass. He then concluded that an atom is not the last unit of matter, rather, it is composed of subatomic particles.