Ernest Rutherford was born in Nelson, New Zealand. Rutherford demonstrated his abilities as a scientist early on while working on his B.Sc. at the University of New Zealand in 1894. He showed that the magnetization can be removed from a magnetized iron needle by dissolving the surface layer of the metal in acid. He began work at Cambridge in 1895 and was a professor at the University of Manchester from 1907 on. It is during this time period that Rutherford made his most important discoveries. Most of Rutherford's work was centered on radioactivity. He is the one who named the alpha and beta particles. In 1911, Rutherford conducted his famous "gold foil" experiment. He di