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).
Marsden was one of two students – the other was Hans Geiger of Geiger counter fame – who toiled over Rutherford’s famous “gold foil experiment”, in which an alpha particle beam was scattered after striking a thin metal foil. The results gave Rutherford one of the scientific breakthroughs of the century. He referred to the experiment as “quite the most incredible event that ever happened to me in my life”. When alpha particles were strongly deflected, it was, he said, “as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you”. The atom, he realised, must be mostly empty space, with an inner core of mass – a nucleus.
Wright captures the excitement of these discoveries, and their historical context. In explaining Rutherford’s lab work, Wright really is describing “the birth of modern physics”, as his title suggests. Although the field is complex, his pithy, boxed-out explainers on subjects from ions to electromagnetism and atomic decay help us to make sense of it all.
The author, to his credit, avoids the storyteller’s temptation to sound certain when he isn’t. The last version of the “gold-foil” experiment I read had Marsden double-checking his results incredulously before calling the boss. But Wright says sources vary as to who told Rutherford. He isn’t sure whether it was Marsden or Geiger, and he says so.
Wright does a good job in describing the work of Rutherford the scientist. He is less successful in bringing Rutherford himself to life.
Many oft-told anecdotes attest to Rutherford’s character: his wit, his warmth and generosity towards colleagues and the students he allowed to shine, and also his legendary stinginess while director of the famous Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. “One student, in need of a short piece of metal tubing, is said to have been directed to the courtyard and told to saw something off a bicycle”, wrote Vaughan Yarwood in his lively 2005 NZ Geographic cover story about Rutherford.
In countless stories like this, Rutherford emerges as a character – a gruff but endearing wit. But humour is in sadly short supply in this biography. Wright takes pains to shoot down the old trope of Rutherford as a hayseed from “simple farming stock”, although it was a running gag for the scientist himself. But as the author points out, Rutherford’s mother, Martha, was a teacher who spent her first pay cheque on a piano; his father, James, helped build bridges for the Nelson railway line and ran a sawmill.
The focus on family finances is about as far as the author gets in working out what made the family tick. Rutherford’s parents Martha and James, his 11 siblings, wife Mary and daughter Eileen are never more than phantoms.
When Wright sketches an appalling tragedy that must have rocked the family in 1886, not long after the death of Rutherford’s baby brother from whooping cough, he gives the impression he’d rather be writing about electromagnets. “[Brothers] Herbert, Jim and Charles were taken boating with a group of others on Pelorus Sound, only for the small boat to capsize,” he writes. “Herbert and Charles were drowned. Ernest would have been with them had he not been sent to the flax mill on an errand. Martha was playing her Broadwood piano when the news reached their Havelock home. According to family sources, she never touched the instrument again and became a sterner figure.”
Charles was 12, and Herbert 11; their bodies were never found, according to a contemporary news report I had to look up myself.
Rutherford has been dismissed as practical rather than brilliant: a rustic tinkerer from the South Seas who got lucky. Wright’s book is the corrective we have always needed: Rutherford, he shows, was a transcendent genius with deductive powers that still seem almost magical.
