who split the atom for the first time
Ernest Rutherford Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei.[6][7] Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate.[5] In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative,[8] he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus,[9] and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering by the gold foil experiment of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. He conducted research that led to the first "splitting" of the atom in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton.[10]
Geiger–Marsden experiment Accolades soon flooded in. Hantaro Nagaoka, who had once proposed a Saturnian model of the atom, wrote to Rutherford from Tokyo in 1911: "Congratulations on the simpleness of the apparatus you employ and the brilliant results you obtained". The conclusions of these experiments revealed how all matter on Earth is structured and thus affected every scientific and engineering discipline, making it one of the most pivotal scientific discoveries of all time. The astronomer Arthur Eddington called Rutherford's discovery the most important scientific achievement since Democritus proposed the atom ages earlier.[11]