As part of an experiment with x-rays in 1909, Rutherford was shooting a beam of alpha particles (or alpha rays, emitted by the radioactive element radium) at a sheet of gold foil only 1/3000 of an ...

Ernest Rutherford's family emigrated from England ... he called this new particle a proton. With this experiment, he was the first human to create a "nuclear reaction," though a weak one.