Who was Rutherford?

Ernest Rutherford was born on the 30th of August 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand. Ernest received his early education in Government schools in Nelson, Rutherford was a very clever student. He received a scholarship to Canterbury College. He graduated from Canterbury with a bachelor’s degree in 1892. He went on to receive other degrees, including one from the University of Cambridge in England.  

His father James Rutherford, a Scottish wheelwright, immigrated to New Zealand with Ernest’s grandfather and the whole family in 1842. His mother, née Martha Thompson, was an English schoolteacher, who, with her widowed mother, also went to live there in 1855.

Ernest Rutherford had won many awards in his life, In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1923), was conferred the Order of Merit in 1925, and was raised to the peerage as Lord Rutherford of Nelson in 1931.