On his first day as president again, Donald Trump upset many people in New Zealand. He said in a speech that America was the first to split the atom, but this important discovery is actually credited to a famous New Zealander named Sir Ernest Rutherford.
During his inauguration speech, Trump talked about America’s many achievements. He mentioned things like crossing tough land, ending slavery, and even sending people into space. However, he mistakenly said it was Americans who split the atom, which is a big scientific milestone.
Nick Smith, the mayor of Nelson (Rutherford’s hometown), was shocked. He couldn’t believe Trump would say that. He posted on Facebook to correct this mistake and announced that he would invite the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand to Rutherford’s memorial site.
Ben Uffindell, a writer of a funny news site, also reacted with surprise, saying, “Trump just claimed that America split the atom. That’s OUR achievement!”
Rutherford was born into a farming family, researched nuclear physics, and split an atom for the first time in 1917 in England. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Later, in 1932, he helped other scientists split the atom again. People call him the “father of nuclear physics” because of his great work.
This isn’t the first time Trump made a mistake about who split the atom. He made a similar claim back in 2020 during a speech at Mount Rushmore. The U.S. did create the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, but it wasn’t the first to split the atom.
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