This was the year that Ernest Rutherford won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his "investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".
The prize was the acknowledgement of years of work at McGill University in Canada and his book Radioactivity which was published in 1904.
Rutherford had, says James Campbell in the DNZB, "unravelled the mysteries of radioactivity, showing that some heavy atoms spontaneously decay into slightly lighter, and chemically different, atoms.
"This discovery of the natural transmutation of elements first brought him to world attention".
It was the first of his three great discoveries and would not be the last time he would come to world attention.
