Ernest Rutherford was born on the 30th of August 1871 in Brightwater near Nelon city in New Zeland. He studied on the University of New Zeland, and then he got a scholarship in Cambridge. He worked there under the management of Sir Joseph John Thomson, in the Cavendish Laboratory. In Cambridge Rutheford conferred a doctor's degree. He was appointed to a professorship on the University of Montreal. He started to search on radioactive discovering alpha particle and beta particle. He discovered in 1899 that particles of alpha were a flux of helium atoms but devoided of electrons. And beta particles are electrons. In 1903 he published with Frederic Soddy a work (Frederick Soddy was a British scientist searching on radioactive; Nobel price 1921). In the work there was a formula describing radioactivity dependence on time and the proof that quantity of radioactive disintegration in the sample is proportional to the quantity of atoms of radioactive substance. Rutheford discovered that proportionality constant for different elements was rendered by some other constant which he called radioactivity constant (decay constant). It determined radioactivity disintegration rate. A year later he ascertained that decay constant inverse multiplied by some number defined a half-life period-time required to reduce element's radioactivity in half. He proved that searching polonium radium for which the half-life period was much shorter than for uranium.
In 1907 he came back to England. He became a professor in Manchester. He set to study the interaction of alpha rays with matter. With Hans Geiger constructed an instrument recording alpha particles- spinthariscope. (Hans Geiger - the constructor of particle counter; the inventor of the empirical law of radioactive disintegration). Thanks to the spinthariscope Rutheford's assistants (Geiger and Marsden) managed to observe the occurrence explained later in 1911 by Rutheford by his new, planetary model of atom.
In 1914 Rutheford proved the wave structure of gamma radiation. In 1919 he moved to Cambridge where he became a director of Cavendish Laboratory. In the same year he managed to conduct the first in the history artificial nuclear transformation. Shooting nitrogen atoms by alpha rays he received a new kind of radiation of the hydrogenium atom mass and positive charge. That was a beam of protons:
During the First World War Rutheford found the method of detecting German submarines by radio monitoring. In 1908 Rutheford received a Noble price. In 1914 he was ennobled; then he became a baron.
He died on the 19th of October 1937.