📍Brightwater, Tasman, New Zealand
1871 – 1875“I was born at Spring Grove, near Brightwater, south of Nelson, in August 1871, the fourth of twelve children. My father, James, was a Scottish wheelwright and engineer who turned his hand to anything, building a flax mill and a sawmill, and my mother, Martha, was an English schoolteacher who believed fiercely in education. Brightwater was a young farming settlement on the Waimea Plains, with orchards, rivers and the mountains behind, and our crowded household had to be practical and resourceful. I spent my first years here before we moved to Foxhill in 1876, and later to Havelock in the Marlborough Sounds, where my father ran a flax mill. I was a cheerful, strong boy who liked to take things apart: clocks, water wheels and home-made gadgets. At Foxhill school a teacher gave me my first science book, and I read it until I knew it by heart. From my parents I learned that anything could be built if you thought it through, and that hard work was simply what you did. I won scholarships to Nelson College and Canterbury College, and in 1895, the story goes, I was digging potatoes in the family garden in Taranaki when news came that I had won a scholarship to Cambridge. I threw down the spade and said that was the last potato I would ever dig. I went on to explain radioactivity, split the atom and discover the atomic nucleus, winning the Nobel Prize in 1908. Brightwater remembers me with a memorial near my birthplace, and my face is on New Zealand's hundred-dollar note.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today