1900-1915(wolfe.defoe)

[] Marie Curie is one of the most elite members of the history of chemistry and physics.From her birth in Poland on November 7, 1867 she was forced to overcome her sex to gain respect and the education that she deserved.Fortunately for us, she did; she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, was the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes, and was the first woman to hold numerous other prestigious positions.Curie was not allowed into any Russian or Polish Universities after finishing high school because she was female; it was obviously quite difficult being a woman in the early 20th century in the worlds of chemistry and physics.She managed to overcome this obstacle and had quite the storied career until her death on July 4, 1934 of leukemia due to her extended work with radioactive materials.The 96th element is named Curium in honor of her and her husband’s contributions to chemistry.

Curie and her husband Pierre performed quite a bit of research together; they discovered the new elements polonium and radium by isolating them from pitchblende, a mineral composed of many different radioactive elements.To do this, the Curies spent long hours in the lab isolating the many elements that made up the pitchblende.In one ton of pitchblende, one tenth of a gram of radium could be extracted.Needless to say, it took many days of monotonous labor to acquire a measurable sample of radium.It was the discovery of this element that won Curie the Nobel Prize in 1911.

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Ernest Rutherford made some of the most important breakthroughs in modern chemistry and physics.He was born August 30th, 1871 as one of twelve children in New Zealand, where he is honored by being featured on their 100 dollar note.A few of his achievements in chemistry and physics include intentionally splitting the atom in 1917, being the first to intentionally change an atom into another (nitrogen into oxygen), and collaborating with Neils Bohr to create the planetary atomic model, though each version have the electron orbits arranged differently.In addition to his innumerable accomplishments in chemistry and physics, he accurately predicted the age of the Earth, was knighted in 1914, has an element named after him (Rutherfordium), and was buried in Westminster Abbey after his death on October 19th, 1937.

The discovery of the neutron was the greatest achievement of Rutherford’s career.He did so by performing the now famous gold foil experiment, which involved shooting radioactive particles at an extremely thin sheet of gold metal surrounded by screens that would show the path that the particles took.One would expect that these particles would pass straight through the foil; Rutherford discovered that many particles had been deflected and some had even bounced straight back off of the foil.This proved that atoms are made up of differently charged parts, which led Rutherford to theorize that the atom contained a positively charged nucleus where nearly all the mass of the atom was found.

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Robert Millikan was born March 22nd, 1868 in America.He considered himself completely devoted to the educational side of physics and made only occasional dalliances into the research aspects of physics.Millikan was very different from most other scientists of his time because he tried to settle the differences between his religious beliefs and his scientific findings, rather than accepting one or the other as absolute truth; he also almost became a physical education teacher, but instead pursued physics, becoming one of the world's foremost physicists.He helped to raise the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, to the front of the American scientific research and educational system.Millikan was the 1923 recipient of the Nobel Prize for his studies on the charge of electrons and the photoelectric effect.

The greatest discovery of Millikan’s career is the charge of the electron.His finding was so accurate that the value accepted today as the charge of the electron is only one percent off from the value that he calculated in 1910.Millikan used the oil drop experiment to evaluate the charge, which involved using an electronic field whose charge was known and oil drops whose buoyant force and gravitational forces were known, and then finding when the gravitational force of the oil drop equaled the repulsive force of the electronic field.

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==JJ Thomson was born on December 18th, 1856 in the United Kingdom.Thomson is best known for his work with cathode rays, discovering how to separate different atoms using positive rays of energy, and his creation of the plum pudding model, though the model was disproved by Ernest Rutherford in 1911.He received multiple honors for his advances in chemistry, physics, and atomic theory, including receiving the Nobel Prize for physics in 1906 for work involving the conduction of electricity through gases, serving as the President of the Royal Society from 1915-1920, being knighted in 1908, and being buried in Westminster Abbey after his death on August 30th, 1940.==

==Thomson’s greatest discovery was the electron, which he accomplished using cathode ray tubes.He would send cathode rays through tubes in which there was a vacuum and deflect the rays using magnets and charged plates.This led him to believe that the rays were made up of “corpuscles”, or the components of the atom, that greatly affected the charge of the atom but made up a very small portion of the atomic mass.== [] []

[[image:plum_puddin_model.png align="right"]]
The Plum Pudding Model