Rutherford's Den

Rutherford’s Den occupies the stone-walled basement of the old Canterbury College clock tower, easily identified by the dark, heavy timber door set into the weathered grey masonry. This space served as the original physics laboratory where Ernest Rutherford conducted his early experiments on magnetism and radio waves in the eighteen nineties. He famously used the cramped, damp conditions to prove that iron could be magnetized by high-frequency oscillations, a discovery that laid the groundwork for his later transformation of modern nuclear physics.