How and when was the first atom split?
Enrico Fermi; Univ of Chicago; 1934 While many believe that Ernest Rutherford became the first person to deliberately split the atom by bombarding nitrogen with naturally occurring alpha particles from radioactive material and observing a proton emitted with energy higher than the alpha particle, this is incorrect. Rutherford forced protons out of the nucleus but did not split the nucleus, as a fission reaction requires. His students 1932 John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, working under Rutherford’s direction, attempted to split the nucleus by entirely artificial means, using a particle accelerator to bombard lithium with protons thereby producing two alpha particles.[1] This did split the nucleus, but nevertheless was not quite the classical nuclear fission which is induced in heavy nuclei, because the daughter fragments are alpha particles– already well-known fragments of excited nuclei, and not considered to be a truly new phenomenon, even if two of them had been produced, and nothi
