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Blue Plaque - Ernest Lord Rutherford

Blue Plaques are issued by 'English Heritage' to commemorate the link between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked. It is a uniquely successful means of connecting people and place.

This plaque commemorates Ernest Lord Rutherford.

the Manchester Museum is intrinsically connected with the University of Manchester.

The Manchester University, formerly the Victoria University of Manchester, formerly Owens College has had a long and successful history in the fields of Physics and Chemistry. A key to this success has been state of the art facilities which have not only brought high profile scientists to the University, but allowed them to perform ground-breaking experimentation.

In the early years of the 20th century a prominent red brick building was erected on Coupland Street at the heart of the campus. The Coupland building was, at the time, the 4th largest physics laboratory in the world.

The facility was designed by Arthur Schuster who had been the Professor of Physics since 1888, and in 1907 Ernest Rutherford took over from Schuster as Professor of Physics at The Victoria University of Manchester.

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson (30th August 1871 – 19th October 1937) was a New Zealand born British chemist and physicist and was to become known as the father of Nuclear Physics.

In his early work at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada he discovered the concept of half-life and proved the theory that one chemical element could through radioactive decay transmutate into another element. It was this research that led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

It was in Manchester that he first theorised in 1911 a new model of the atom, which was to become known as the Rutherford Model and would revolutionise the study and practise of physics.

In 1917 Rutherford set up an experiment in the Coupland Building, a part of the Victoria University of Manchester’s campus. It was through this experiment that Rutherford, along with his students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton were credited with the first 'Splitting of the Atom'. Manchester, under Rutherford had become a successful cutting edge centre for practical and theoretical physics.