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Ernest Rutherford Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand in 1871 as one of 12 children. It was Rutherford who first "split" an atom and who discovered the atomic "nucleus", a name that he invented. For this he is regarded as the greatest experimental physicist of his time. Rutherford was one of the first and most important researchers in nuclear physics. Soon after the discovery of radioactivity in 1986 by the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel, Rutherford discovered …

…Today, with the threat of nuclear weapons and the promise of nuclear power it must appear that the splitting of the atom was Rutherford's most significant achievement. Rutherford was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1903 and served as president of that institution from 1925 to 1930. He was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry, was knighted in 1914, and was created a baron in 1931. He died in London on October 19, 1937, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.