He was one of those individuals who spent his spare time as a young man not in a bar but in going to scientific lectures. Well a lot of them do things like join astronomy clubs. Some of them build telescopes. Some of them discover comets. But it's easy to be sent in the wrong direction today.
Many laymen picture atoms as a little solar system.
That's not quite it, I guess. That was Bohr's original proposal. Rutherford had found experimentally that the atom contains a positively charged nucleus that contains most of the mass and is very small compared to the size of the atom. Bohr found that if he assumed an inverse square law of attraction between an electron and the nucleus and introduced restrictions referred to as quantization you could describe the discrete energy states of the hydrogen atom. The model assumed that the electrons in the atom moved in planetary orbits about the nucleus.