What did john rutherford discover?
In 1908 Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize – for chemistry! The award citation read: “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances.” While at McGill University, he had discovered that the radioactive element thorium emitted a gas which was itself radioactive, but if the gas radioactivity was monitored separately from the thorium’s, he found it decreased geometrically, losing approximately half its current strength for each minute that passed. The gas he had found was a short-lived isotope of radon, and this was the first determination of a “half-life” for a radioactive material.
