ABSTRACT
This chapter includes early papers written in New Zealand, at the Cavendish Laboratory and during the Montreal period (1894-1906), as well as an introduction to Rutherford's early work by Sir Edward Appleton, and some reminiscences of his time in Canada by Professors H. L. Bronson and Otto Hahn. The active deposit of radium, rather than radium itself, was chosen as a source of radiation in order to obtain a homogeneous pencil of rays. Using the photographic method, the rays were found to be all equally deflected by a strong magnetic field, i.e. they consisted of particles projected at the same speed. M. Becquerel states that the rays showed no appreciable dispersion in a magnetic field, for no difference in the width of the lines was observed for fields of 10,000 and 20,000 units. Suppose the radium is covered with any thickness of foil, provided it is less than that required to cut off completely the photographic effect of the rays.
