Rutherford correction

The letter First broadcast (Nov 24) contains an error that should long have been put to rest by New Zealand. Ernest Rutherford did not discover the existence of radio waves. They were first predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864 in his equations of electromagnetism and first confirmed experimentally by Heinrich Hertz in 1888.

In his first research at Canterbury College in 1893, Ernest Rutherford studied the magnetisation of iron at high frequencies and developed various ingenious devices for this work. In his second year he extended to yet higher frequencies by using the heavily damped electrical discharge in a Hertzian oscillator. After three degrees from Canterbury, in 1895 he went to Cambridge on a scholarship. For his third research there he put his magnetic detector of damped oscillations into the receiving circuit of a Hertzian oscillator and, on February 22, 1896, set a world record for the distance over which ‘wireless’ waves had been detected, half a mile.

That was the end of his excursion into ‘wireless’ waves at that time, though in Canada in 1903 he became the first person to transmit a ‘wireless’ signal between station and moving train.

Rutherford has international fame for his lifetime’s work on the atom. We don’t need to invent more.

John Campbell, Physics Department, University of Canterbury, author of Rutherford: Scientist Supreme