William Henry Bragg
1862–1942, Westward, Cumberland, England, London, England
British physicist who shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his son for their contributions to the analysis of crystal structures by X-rays.
Born in Cumberland, Bragg studied mathematics at Cambridge before taking a physics professorship at the University of Adelaide in 1886. He returned to Britain in 1909, taught at Leeds and then London, and investigated X-rays and radioactivity.
With his son William Lawrence, he developed the use of X-rays to examine crystals; the two shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics. Bragg later led the Royal Institution and its Davy Faraday Laboratory, helping establish X-ray crystallography as a tool for investigating the structure of matter.
Nobel-winning work
W. H. Bragg shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his son 'for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays'. He built the X-ray spectrometer (1913) that quantitatively measured diffracted intensities, and with Lawrence derived Bragg's law nλ = 2d sinθ, turning Laue's diffraction into a tool for solving atomic arrangements — NaCl, diamond and many minerals.
Workplaces: University of Leeds, University of London, Royal Institution, London
United Kingdom