William Lawrence Bragg was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure.
Background
William Lawrence Bragg was born on March 31, 1890 in Adelaide, South Australia. He was the son of William Henry and Gwendoline (Todd) Bragg. His father was professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Adelaide; his mother, Gwendoline Todd Bragg, was the daughter of Sir Charles Todd, South Australia’s postmaster general and government astronomer. Bragg had a brother one year younger than he, Robert, who was killed at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I, and a sister, Gwendolen, seventeen years his junior. The children’s parents were a contrast.
Education
Bragg attended St. Peter’s College (a secondary school) in Adelaide and entered the University of Adelaide in 1905 at the age of fifteen. He attended the University of Adelaide, graduated with first-class honors in mathematics in 1908 then he was a student of Trinity College and Cambridge University, graduated with first-class honors in natural sciences in 1912.
He conducted research on X rays with father, William Henry Bragg during the years 1912-1914, he worked at Cambridge University, England, as a lecturer in 1917-19, at University of Manchester in England as a professor of physics in 1919-38, at National Physical Laboratory as a director in 1938, at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge as a professor of physics beginning in 1939 and he was a director of Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory in the Royal Institution of London in 1954-66. He passed over a military service: he served during World War I with British forces in France and Belgium then during World War II in Canada as a scientific liaison and finally he advised the British navy on methods of underwater detection of submarines.
In 1948 he became interested in the structure of proteins and was partly responsible for creating a group that used physics to solve biological problems. He played a part in the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, in that he provided support to Francis Crick and James D. Watson who worked under his aegis at the Cavendish.
Bragg's original announcement of the discovery of the structure of DNA was made at a Solvay conference on proteins in Belgium on April 8, 1953, but went unreported by the press. He then gave a talk at Guys Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday 14 May 1953, which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in The News Chronicle of London on Friday 15 May 1953, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life."
Bragg was gratified to see that the X-ray method that he developed forty years before was at the heart of this profound insight to the nature of life itself. At the same time at the Cavendish, Max Perutz was also doing his Nobel Prize winning work on the structure of haemoglobin. Bragg subsequently successfully lobbied for, and nominated, Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Wilkins' share recognised the contribution made by researchers (using X-ray crystallography) at King's College London to the determination of the structure of DNA. Among those researchers was Rosalind Franklin, whose "photograph 51" showed that DNA was a double helix, not a triple helix as Linus Pauling had proposed. Franklin died before the prize (which only goes to living people) was awarded.
William Lawrence Bragg has got such awards as Nobel Prize in physics (with father, William Henry Bragg) in 1915, named Commander of the British Empire in 1941, named Companion of honour in 1967, he received many other awards and honorary doctorates. He was knighted in 1941.
William Lawrence Bragg was a member of such organizations as International Union of Crystallography, he became a president in 1948, a member of numerous scientific academies around the world.
Interests
painting, literature, gardening
Connections
On December 10, 1921 William Lawrence Bragg married Alice Hopkinson. They had four children: Stephen, David, Margaret, Patience.
