| A Timeline of Nuclear Physics 1895
Wilhelm Röntgen
discovers x-rays.
1896
Henri Becquerel
discovers radioactivity.
1897
Sir Joseph Thomson discovers the electron.
1898
Pierre and Marie Curie discover
radium.
1905
Albert Einstein suggests that mass can be converted to
energy.
1911
Ernest,
Lord Rutherford, discovers the atomic nucleus.
1913
Niels Bohr describes the structure of the atom.
1919
Rutherford splits the atom.
1932
Harold Urey discovers deuterium.
Sir James Chadwick discovers the neutron.
Carl Anderson discovers the positron.
Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton use a particle
accelerator to split lithium into two alpha particles.
1938
Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, and Fritz Strassmann
discover nuclear fission.
1940
Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls calculate the
critical mass of uranium 235.
1941
Glenn Seaborg isolates plutonium.
1942
Enrico Fermi builds the first nuclear reactor, as part of
the U.S. Manhattan Project.
1945
The United States explodes its first nuclear bomb, at
Alamagordo, New Mexico.
The United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Japan.
1949
The Soviet Union conducts its first nuclear test.
1951
The first nuclear-generated electricity is produced from
the Atomic Energy Commission's experimental breeder
ractor in Idaho.
1952
The United States detonates a hydrogen bomb at
niwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands.
1953
The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN)
is founded near Geneva, Switzerland.
1953
Calder Hall, the world's first commercial-scale
nuclear power plant, is established in England.
1964
The omega-minus elementary particle is
discovered at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
1979
The world's first nuclear power plant accident
occurs at Three
Mile Island, Pennsylvania.
1986
An explosion at a nuclear power plant at
Chernobyl, Ukraine, releases radiation over the
surrounding region.
SEE ALSO
Wilhelm Röntgen
Henri Becquerel
Marie Curie
Ernest, Lord
Rutherford
Three
Mile Island
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