The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle

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“…Thus Ernest Rutherford, who was born in 1871, recollected [1]: I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or gray in colour, according to taste.…”

A History of Radiation Detection Instrumentation

“…It was a fond recollection of sunlight shining on tiny water droplets in the clouds swirling around the summit of Scotland's Ben Nevis that spurred the attempts in 1895 of Charles Wilson to investigate cloud formation (Keller 1983). The simple apparatus that Wilson, a young graduate student in J.J. Thompson's Cambridge laboratory, constructed to duplicate Nature's magic consisted of an air-filled cylinder, the bottom of which was formed by the top of a piston.…”

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“…In the second half of the XIXth century many physicists and chemists regarded the idea of atoms with suspicion and those who accepted it imagined atoms to be indivisible and indestructible entities. Thus Ernest Rutherford, who was born in 1871, recollected [1]: I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or gray in colour, according to taste. However, around 1900 the experiments with the cathode rays (discovered in 1869) and radioactive substances (discovered in 1896), as well as the studies of atomic spectra, led to conclusions which could be summarized as follows:…”