Chemistry J.J. Thomson of Cambridge University discovered the electron and soon after the French scientist Becquerel as well as the couple Pierre and Marie Curie investigated the phenomenon of radioactivity. In a series of pioneering scattering experiments Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester discovered the internal structure of the atom and the existence of the proton, classified and explained the different types of radioactivity and successfully transmuted the first element by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles. His work on atomic structure was improved on by his students, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and Henry Moseley. The electronic theory of chemical
History of nuclear weapons alpha particles; Enrico Fermi reported similar results when bombarding uranium with neutrons. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to "Naturwissenschaften" reporting that they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch correctly interpreted these results as being due to the splitting of the uranium atom. (Frisch confirmed this experimentally on January 13, 1939.) They gave the process the name "fission" because of its similarity to the splitting of a cell into two new cells. Even before it was published, news of Meitner’s and Frisch’s interpretation