William Henry Bragg (1862–1942) was a British physicist, chemist and mathematician who, together with his son William Lawrence Bragg, founded the science of X-ray crystallography and shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics.[1]
Early life and education
William Henry Bragg was born on 2 July 1862 at Westward, near Wigton in Cumberland, England.[3] He was educated at King William's College on the Isle of Man before winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and graduated with high honours in 1884.
Academic career
In 1886 Bragg was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, a post he held for more than two decades.[3] Returning to Britain, he took the chair of physics at the University of Leeds in 1909 and later became Quain Professor of Physics at University College London.
X-ray crystallography and the Nobel Prize
Following Max von Laue's 1912 discovery that crystals diffract X-rays, Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg developed methods to determine the arrangement of atoms within crystals. The elder Bragg designed the X-ray spectrometer, while father and son together established the relationship now known as Bragg's law, which connects the wavelength of X-rays to the spacing of atomic planes.[2] For this analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays, the two shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics — the only father-and-son pair ever to be jointly awarded the prize.[2]
Later career and public life
Bragg was knighted in 1920 and in 1923 became director of the Royal Institution in London, where he built an influential research school devoted to crystallography.[1] A gifted communicator, he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and served as President of the Royal Society from 1935 to 1940.
Legacy
Bragg's methods transformed physics, chemistry and later molecular biology, providing the experimental basis for determining the structures of minerals, metals and, eventually, complex biological molecules such as proteins and DNA.[1] He was awarded the Copley Medal in 1930 and the Rumford Medal in 1916, and he died in London on 12 March 1942.
