Wellington: US President Donald Trump, in his inauguration address on Monday, made several false and misleading claims including his declaration that Americans "split the atom".
This prompted vexed social media posts by New Zealanders, who said the achievement belonged to a pioneering scientist revered in his homeland.
In his speech, Trump said: Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers...They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.
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 while he worked at a university in Manchester in the United Kingdom.
The achievement is also credited to English scientist John Douglas Cockroft and Ireland's Ernest Walton, researchers in 1932 at a British laboratory developed by Rutherford. It is not attributed to Americans.
Trump's remarks provoked a flurry of online posts by New Zealanders about Rutherford, whose work is studied by New Zealand schoolchildren and whose name appears on buildings, streets and institutions. His portrait features on the 100-dollar banknote.