WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Among other false and misleading claims in President Donald Trump’s inaugural address, his declaration that the Americans “splited the atom” sparked inflammatory posts on social media from New Zealanders. gave birth to, who said that this achievement belongs to a respected scientist in his homeland.
Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel laureate known as the father of nuclear physics, is considered by many to be the first person to artificially produce a nuclear reaction in 1917 while working at a university in Manchester, England. By deliberately splitting the atom.
Credit for this achievement also goes to the English scientist John Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Walton of Ireland, who were researchers in a British laboratory set up by Rutherford in 1932. It is not attributed to Americans.
Describing American greatness in his inaugural address on Monday, Trump said Americans had “crossed deserts, scaled mountains, faced untold dangers, conquered the Wild West, ended slavery, saved millions of lives Liberated from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the skies and placed the universe of human knowledge in the palm of human hands.
New Zealand politician Nick Smith, mayor of Nelson, where Rutherford was born and educated, said he was “a little surprised” by the claim.
“Rutherford’s ground-breaking research on radio communication, radioactivity, atomic structure and ultrasound technology was conducted at Cambridge and Manchester Universities in the UK and McGill University in Montreal, Canada,” Smith wrote on Facebook.
Smith said he would invite the next US ambassador to New Zealand to visit the memorial at Rutherford’s birthplace “so we can preserve the historical record of who split the atom first.”
A website for the US Department of Energy’s Office of History and Heritage Resources credits Cockcroft and Walton with this milestone, although it credits Rutherford’s early work in mapping the structure of the atom, the formation of the central nucleus, and the identification of protons. Describes achievements.
Trump’s remarks sparked a flurry of online posts from New Zealanders about Rutherford, whose work is read by New Zealand schoolchildren and whose name appears on buildings, streets and institutions. His image is featured on the $100 banknote.
“Well, I have to make a call. Trump has just claimed that America has split the atom,” said Ben Effendale, editor of the New Zealand satirical news website The Civilian. Written on X. “That’s what we’ve done.”
