During Trump’s inauguration, he listed off a number of achievements by Americans in the past. 

“Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness, they crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand,” he said during the speech.

One achievement – splitting the atom – was especially baffling, as that was achieved by a New Zealand physicist working at a university in the UK.

“I was a bit surprised by new President Donald Trump in his inauguration speech about US greatness claiming today Americans ‘split the atom’ when that honour belongs to Nelson’s most famous and favourite son Sir Ernest Rutherford,” Dr Nick Smith, the Mayor of Nelson, New Zealand, responded in a Facebook post.

“Rutherford, born in Brightwater, raised in Foxhill and Havelock and educated at Nelson College and Canterbury University went on to split the atom in 1917 at Victoria University in Manchester in the UK. He was the first to artificially induce a nuclear reaction by bombarding nitrogen nuclei with alpha particles.”

The term “splitting the atom” isn’t the most descriptive way of explaining what Rutherford, along with John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, actually achieved; splitting apart a nucleus by bombarding it with nucleons, causing it to split into two smaller atoms. 

In 1917, Rutherford became the first person to induce an artificial nuclear reaction, bombarding nitrogen gas with alpha particles – two neutrons and two protons, tightly bound together.

“These experiments indicated that penetrating radiation was emitted that Rutherford hypothesised might be the nucleus of a hydrogen atom,” the University of Manchester, where Rutherford conducted a number of these experiments, explains. 

“Later painstaking research done by Patrick Blackett, at Rutherford’s suggestion in Cambridge in the 1920’s, captured rare cloud chamber images that revealed the full detail of what was happening. The photographs showed some of the alpha particles were absorbed by the nitrogen nuclei. This process led to excess energy in the nitrogen nuclei, resulting in an oxygen atom and a hydrogen nucleus being emitted.”

While an incredible achievement, few nuclear reactions could be achieved through bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles. Rutherford’s work with Niels Bohr in the 1920s, predicting the existence of neutrons, was later confirmed in an experiment by Rutherford’s colleagues.

“John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton developed a device, an accelerator, to generate more penetrating radiation,” the Nobel Prize website explains. “Using a strong electric field, protons were accelerated to high velocities. In 1932, they bombarded lithium with protons, causing their nuclei to split and producing two alpha particles.”

In reality, splitting the atom was the result of international collaboration, and scientific advancement from around the world. It’s possible Trump may have been confused with work that took place at the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. However, this too is a little more complicated, as the uranium atom was first split in 1938 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in December 1938, in Germany.

It seems that some New Zealanders are unhappy with their New Zealand-born physicist being left out of the picture by Trump.

Trump aside, Rutherford did get the recognition he deserved for his work, including having the element “Rutherfordium” named after him. Mayor Smith has now issued an invite to Trump’s team, in an effort to correct Trump’s error.

“I will be inviting the US Ambassador to NZ (when appointed by the President) to Nelson to visit the Lord Rutherford Memorial in Brightwater,” he added, “so we can keep the historic record on who split the atom first accurate.”