William Henry Bragg shared a Nobel Prize with his own son
In November 1915, William Henry Bragg and his son Lawrence jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for using X-rays to reveal how atoms sit inside crystals, the only father and son to share one. Just two months earlier, Bragg's younger son Robert had died of wounds at Gallipoli.
Bragg was born in 1862 in Westward, Cumberland, to a merchant seaman turned farmer. His mother died when he was seven, and an uncle raised him in Market Harborough. A strong mathematician, he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, as third Wrangler in 1884, and the next year, aged 23, took a chair teaching both mathematics and physics in Adelaide, South Australia. Knowing little practical physics, he apprenticed himself to instrument makers to build equipment for a science school that had only a handful of students.
Australia shaped his career. On 29 May 1896, only months after Röntgen's announcement, he showed local doctors how X-rays revealed hidden structures, using a tube a pharmaceutical chemist had brought from England and a battery borrowed from his father-in-law, the astronomer Charles Todd. In September 1897 he gave Australia's first recorded public demonstration of wireless telegraphy. A 1904 address on the ionisation of gases launched research that earned him Royal Society fellowship within three years. He also helped bring lacrosse to South Australia and ran the university chess association.
Sailing home in 1908 on the maiden voyage of the SS Waratah, he worried about the ship's persistent list and judged its centre of gravity dangerously high. The Waratah vanished at sea the following year, and he testified to its instability at the inquiry. At Leeds he invented the X-ray spectrometer and, with Lawrence, founded X-ray crystallography.
During the First World War he led Admiralty research on listening for submarines, developing an improved directional hydrophone and a system of widely spaced coastal microphones that pinpointed distant explosions. He later directed the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory at the Royal Institution, gave four Christmas Lectures, and became President of the Royal Society in 1935. He died in London in 1942, and a lunar crater bears his name.
Source: William Henry Bragg
