Ernest Rutherford

Born in New Zealand in 1871, Rutherford arrived at atomic physics when radioactivity was still unnamed vapour. By 1908 his work on radioactive decay and element disintegration earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Three years later he interpreted the gold foil scattering results from Geiger and Marsden and proposed that an atom's charge sits in a tiny, dense nucleus - overturning the diffuse-pudding model overnight. He brought Niels Bohr to his lab in 1912; together they sketched the orbital atom. In 1917 he fired alpha particles at nitrogen and knocked loose what he first called a hydrogen atom, then recognised as the proton - the first artificially induced nuclear reaction. He became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1919, and under him Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932 and Cockcroft and Walton split the nucleus in controlled conditions the same year. He died in 1937 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Element 104 now carries his name.