In simple terms, that assertion is correct, but for those with an expertise in the field, the longer answer to who did it ...

When U.S. President Donald Trump claimed during his inaugural address that Americans “split the atom,” a ripple of irritation ...

The term "splitting the atom" isn't the most descriptive way of explaining what Rutherford, along with John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, actually achieved; splitting apart a nucleus by bombarding ...

The mayor of Nelson in New Zealand's South Island seized on the subatomic slight, pointing out that work to split the atom was actually pioneered by Kiwi-born physicist Ernest Rutherford.

Ernest Rutherford (right) and Hans Geiger led the experiments in Manchester Scientists based in Manchester, not the US, made the "key breakthrough" in splitting the atom, despite Donald Trump's ...

Donald Trump angered New Zealanders on his first day in office when he asserted that America split the atom, something that Sir Ernest Rutherford accomplished. Donald Trump angered New Zealanders ...

Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize winner known as the father of nuclear physics, is regarded by many as the first to knowingly split the atom by artificially inducing a nuclear reaction in 1917 ...

Sir Ernest Rutherford has been called the 'father of nuclear physics' When Donald Trump claimed US scientists split the atom in his inaugural speech, even he could not have imagined the chain ...

When Donald Trump claimed US scientists split the atom in his inaugural speech, even he could not have imagined the chain reaction of online debate his boast would cause. Many of those leaping on ...

Rutherford made a series of discoveries about the nature of atoms and, working with colleagues Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, presented a planetary model of the atom in 1911. In it, he laid out ...