Today It Would Be Brian Cox !

On the evening of the 6th March 1911 the guest lecturer at the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society meeting was Professor Rutherford.
Ernest Rutherford became known as the father of nuclear physics and won the nobel prize for chemistry in 1908.
He is widely credited with first 'splitting the atom' in 1917.
After his death in 1937 he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey.
The title of this lecture in Rochdale was : 'Transformations of radio-active matter'.
For those living locally, this work can be read in the Local Studies Library at Touchstones Rochdale.