Rutherfordium was the first of the transactinide elements, first reported in the 1960s with rival claims from Dubna in the Soviet Union and from Berkeley, touching off a prolonged naming controversy. The name eventually chosen honours Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand-born physicist regarded as the father of nuclear physics. Rutherfordium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, existing only for moments and studied a few atoms at a time. Its most stable isotope lasts around an hour, yet chemists have managed to show, working with single atoms, that it behaves like a heavier relative of hafnium and zirconium, confirming its place in group four as the first element beyond the actinides.
Rutherford, who identified the atomic nucleus through the celebrated gold-foil scattering experiments carried out with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1911, had earlier won the 1908 Nobel Prize, in chemistry rather than physics, for his work on radioactive decay, a classification he found so amusing that he joked he had himself been transmuted, in an instant, from a physicist into a chemist, a quip later element-namers evidently appreciated when they attached his name to the element that opened the transactinide series.