BACKGROUND

• Rutherford grew up in a very poor family and had to find inventive ways of overcoming his struggles

• He was the 4th of 12 children

• Was a former student of J.J. Thomson

• He won a scholarship to Canterbury College in 1890

• At Canterbury, he married his landlady's daughter, Mary Newton

• His students actually preformed the Gold Foil experiment, yet he received all the credit.

• He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of atomic structure.

• Died of a strangulated hernia on Oct. 19, 1937