Why Is Ernest Rutherford Important

Introduction
Did you know that the first Nobel Peace Prize for Chemistry was given to Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff in 1901 for his discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions? Over the next 115 years it has been awarded to some of the world's top scientists and chemists. In 1908 it was awarded to Ernest Rutherford for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances. Ernest lived a very interesting life.
Author's Background
Born in New Zealand in 1871, he aspired to be great. At the age of 26 he moved to Canada and became Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on December 10th, 1908. Rutherford
Rutherford spent his life studying radioactive elements and their importance to our world. Rutherford made the groundbreaking discovery that nearly the total mass of an atom is concentrated in a nucleus.He also found that radioactive elements have "half-lives." In so doing, he gave birth to the nuclear model, a discovery that marked the inception of nuclear physics, leading to his win of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This discovery added on to Rutherford's previous discoveries.
Importance
The discovery by Rutherford had great importance. It led the way for experiments with radioactive materials. It also paved the way for atomic bombs. Rutherfords discovery of how the atom is layed out led to to Bohrs model being created. Niels Bohr, who was spending time as a research student in Rutherford’s laboratory in 1912, was intrigued by Rutherford’s model of the atom. He could see that the separation of charge into positive nucleus and orbiting electrons was unstable. He explored the implications of such an atom, leading directly to the first model of the atom, the Rutherford-Bohr atom.