THE ELECTRICAL STRUCTURE OF MATTERS 



By Prof. Sir Ernest Rutherford, D. Sc. LL. D., Ph. D., F. R. S. 



It was in 1896 that this association last met in Liverpool, under 

 the presidency of the late Lord Lister, that great pioneer in antisep- 

 tic surgery, whose memory is held in affectionate remembrance by 

 all nations. His address, which dealt mainly with the history of 

 the application of antiseptic methods to surgery and its connection 

 with the work of Pasteurj that prince of experimenters, whose birth 

 has been so fittingly celebrated this year, gave us in a sense a com- 

 pleted page of brilliant scientific history. At the same time, in his 

 opening remarks. Lister emphasized the importance of the discovery 

 by Rontgen of a new type of radiation, the X rays, which we now 

 see marked the beginning of a new and fruitful era in another 

 branch of the science. 



The visit to your city in 1896 was for me a memorable occasion, for 

 it was here that I first attended a meeting of this association, and 

 hear that I read my first scientific paper. But of much more impor- 

 tance, it was here that I benefited by the opportunity, which these 

 gatherings so amply afford, of meeting for the first time many of the 

 distinguished scientific men of this country and the foreign repre- 

 sentatives of science who were the guests of this city on that oc- 

 casion. The year 1896 has always seemed to me a memorable one for 

 other reasons, for on looking back with some sense of perspective 

 we can not fail to recognize that the last Liverpool meeting marked 

 the beginning of what has been aptly termed the heroic age of phys- 

 ical science. Never before in the history of physics has there been 

 witnessed such a period of intense activity when discoveries of 

 fundamental importance have followed one another with such 

 bewildering rapidity. 



The discovery of X rays by Rontgen had been published to the 

 world in 1895, while the discovery of the radioactivity of uranium 

 by Becquerel was announced early in 1896. Even the most imagina- 

 tive of our scientific men could never have dreamed at that time of 

 the extension of our knowledge of the structure of matter that was to 



» Presidential address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 

 Liverpool. 1923. Reprinted by permission from the Proceedings of the Association, 1923. 



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