William lawrence bragg: The pioneer of X-ray crystallography and his pervasive influence

Angewandte Chemie - International Edition

Volumn 51, Issue 52, 2012, Pages 12946-12958

  Thomas, John Meurig ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Bragg; Crystallography; History of chemistry; Laue; Max; William Lawrence; X ray diffraction

Indexed keywords

BRAGG; HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY; LAUE; MAX; WILLIAM LAWRENCE;

CRYSTALLOGRAPHY; X RAY DIFFRACTION;

X RAY CRYSTALLOGRAPHY;

EID: 84871969622     PISSN: 14337851     EISSN: 15213773     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/anie.201206509     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. "The structure of some crystals as indicated by their diffraction of X-rays": W. L. Bragg, Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 1913, 89, 248.
2. W. L. Bragg, Remarks made at the First Conference on X-ray Analysis in Industry, held in Cambridge in 1942. Reproduced in full in Ref. [9].
3. "The structure of diamond": W. L. Bragg, W. H. Bragg, Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 1913, 89, 277.
4. "Interferenzerscheinungen bei Röntgenstrahlen": a)W. Friedrich, P. Knipping, M. Laue, Münch. Ber. 1912, 303
5. "Eine quantitative Prüfung der theorie für die Interferenzerscheinunge bei Röntgenstrahlen": M. Laue, Münch. Ber. 1912, 36.
6. a) Somewhere between St. John's College and the site of Darwin College. b) It is remarkable that Laue recalls in his autobiography the very time and place when the idea for a mathematical explanation of the spots in the photographs taken by Friedrich and Knipping "occurred to him". It was not far from his apartment at Bismarkstrasse 22 just in front of the house at Siegfriedstrasse 10 in Munich.
7. "William Lawrence Bragg": D. C. Phillips, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1979, 25, 1.
8. Laue felt that his two co-workers should have shared the Nobel Prize with him, and he distributed the money equally between the three.[8]
9. "Laue centennial": W. W. Schmidt, W. Steurer, Acta Crystallogr. Sect. A 2012, 68, 1.
10. Fifty Years of X-ray Diffraction (Ed.: P. P. Ewald), International Union of Crystallography, Utrecht, 1962, Sections I and II in particular.
11. See also "Paul Peter Ewald": H. A. Bethe, G. Hildebrandt, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1988, 34, 134, especially pp. 153-155.
12. In the 19th century it was common practice for physical scientists -and possibly others -to distribute reprints of their important papers to others across the globe. Willard Gibbs, at Yale, for example, sent a copy of his famous work on the phase rule to James Clerk Maxwell in Cambridge.
13. Royal Institution of Great Britain Archives: RI MS WHB 7A/3.
14. a) J. Jenkin, William and Lawrence Bragg, Father and Son: The Most Extraordinary Collaboration in Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, p. 326
15. "L. Vegard, C. R. Bury, and the electronic interpretation of the Periodic Table"
16. M. Davies, Arch. Hist. Exact. Sci. 1990, 40, 185.
17. "The diffraction of short electromagnetic waves by a crystal": W. L. Bragg, Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 1912, 17, 43.
18. WLB avoided using the word X-rays out of respect for his father, who was an ardent believer that X-rays were corpuscles not waves.
19. WLB had been given one of the five X-ray spectrometers that were made in the workshops of the Department of Physics, University of Leeds, to take to Cambridge
20. see "The Bragg Notebook: ACommentary and Interpretation". http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/bragg-notebook/written by Dr. Christopher Hammond
21. see also C. Hammond, The Basics of Crystallography and Diffraction, 3rd ed., Oxford Science Publications, Oxford, 2009.
22. C. T. R. Wilson (1869-1959), Nobel Laureate, discoverer of the "cloud chamber". It was said of him by his contemporaries "*the most gentle and serene, and the most indifferent to prestige and honours." WLB said that Wilson's undergraduate lectures on optics were outstanding.
23. H. G. J. Moseley (1887-1915). To investigate the positive charge on atomic nuclei, he examined their element-characteristic Xray spectra.
24. K. M. G. Siegbahn (1886-1978), a pioneer of X-ray spectroscopy, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924.
25. "The crystal structures of hematite and corundum": L. Pauling, S. B. Hendricks, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1925, 47, 781.
26. "The crystal structure of barite": L. Pauling, P. H. Emmett, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1925, 47, 1026.
27. "The crystal structure of brookite": L. Pauling, J. H. Sturdivant, Z. Kristallogr. 1928, 68, 239.
28. "The crystal structure of topaz": L. Pauling, Proc. Natl. head. Sci. USA 1928, 14, 603.
29. "The structure of the micas and related minerals": L. Pauling, Proc. Natl. head. Sci. USA 1930, 16, 123.
30. The Braggs are the only parent-child pair in history to share a Nobel Prize, and WLB remains the youngest ever to win the Prize at age 25.
31. "British achievements in X-ray crystallography": W. L. Bragg, Science 1960, 131, 1870.
32. "The architecture of the invisible": J. M. Thomas, Nature 1993, 364, 478.
33. "X-ray crystallography": W. L. Bragg, Sci. Am. 1968, 219, 58.
34. "The success story of crystallography": D. Schwarzenbach, Acta Crystallogr. Sect. A 2012, 68, 57.
35. "Multiplicity distribution of reflections in Laue diffraction": a) D. W. J. Cruickshank, J. R. Helliwell, K. Moffat, Acta Crystallogr. Sect. A 1987, 43, 656
36. "Laue crystallography: coming of age": b) Z. Ren, D. Bourgeois, J. R. Helliwell, K. Moffat, V. Srajer, B. L. Stoddard, J. Synchrotron Radiat. 1999, 6, 891.
37. "The recording and analyses of synchrotron radiation X-ray Laue photographs": D.W. J. Cruickshank, J. R. Helliwell, L. N. Johnson, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. A 1992, 340, 167.
38. "Imaging with X-ray free-electron facilities": H. N. Chapman, Nat. Mater. 2009, 8, 299
39. see also on this theme R. Neutze, R. Wouts, D. van der Spoel, F. Wechert, J. Hajdu, Nature 2000, 406, 752.
40. "High-resolution protein structure determination by serial femtosecond crystallography": S. Boutet, J. C. H. Spence et al., Science 2012, 337, 362.
41. "Bakerian Lecture: X-rays and Crystal Structure": W. H. Bragg, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. A 1915, 215, 253.
42. "The computation of Fourier syntheses with a digital electronic calculating machine": J. M. Bennett, J. C. Kendrew, Acta Crystallogr. 1952, 5, 109.
43. M. F. Perutz in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990, p. 71.
44. J. C. Kendrew in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990, p. 88.
45. F. C. H. Crick in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990, p. 109.
46. Francis Crick won his Nobel Prize before he graduated with a PhD.
47. J. D. Watson, The Double Helix, Athenaeum, New York, 1968.
48. L. Pauling, personal communication, 1990.
49. L. Pauling in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990, p. 86.
50. H. S. Lipson in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990, p. 100.
51. "Structure of some crystalline lysozyme-inhibitor complexes determined by X-ray analysis": D. C. Phillips, L. N. Johnson, Nature 1965, 206, 986.
52. J. Dunitz in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990.
53. "A three-dimensional model of the myoglobin molecule obtained by X-ray analysis": J. C. Kendrew,G. Bodo, H. M. Dintzis, R. G. Parrish, H. Wyckoff, D. C. Phillips, Nature 1958, 180, 662.
54. "The early history of lysozyme": See L. N. Johnson, Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 1998, 11, 942
55. see obituary of L. N. Johnson in Nature, 25 October 2012.
56. G. Porter in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990, p. 126.
57. W. L. Bragg, C.F. Claringbull, Crystal Structures of Minerals, (G. Bell & Sons, London, 1965.
58. Advice to lecturers by M. Faraday and Lawrence Bragg (an anthology). Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1974.
59. Bob wrote home (see Ref. [12]) "We had an awful mix-up when we landed: the arrangements here seem perfectly scandalous*-someone ought to get the sack." My own father was in the Gallipoli landing. He told me, so inept was the planning, that within a few hours of landing, a third of the men around him lay dead.
60. "The structure of diopside, CaMg(SiO3)2": W. L. Bragg, B. Warren, Z. Kristallogr. 1928, 69, 168. In his autobiography, WLB says that the structure of diopside was a turning point in our ideas about silicate structures. It showed that the "SiO3" which appears in the chemical formula does not represent SiO3 acid groups but a string of SiO4 groups joined by shared oxygen atoms. It was a crucial step in showing that silicon always occurs in a tetrahedron group of oxygen atoms. Although this is largely true it is not invariably the case. A new silicate mineral, stishovite, was discovered in 1962 where Si4+ atoms are in sixfold coordination.[56]
61. "Identifying the coordination for silicon by magic-angle-spinning NMR: Stishovite and quartz": J. M. Thomas, J. M. Gonzalez-Calbet, C. A. Fyfe, G. C. Gobbi, M. F. Nicol, Geophys. Res. Lett. 1983, 10, 91.
62. "The effect of thermal agitation on atomic arrangements in alloys":W. L. Bragg, E. J. Williams, Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 1934, 145, 699.
63. "X-ray crystal structure analysis in Manchester fromW. L. Bragg to the present day (2002)": J. R. Helliwell, Z. Kristallogr. 2002, 217, 385.
64. "Blowing bubbles with Bragg": SeeW. M. Lomer in Selections and Reflections: The Legacy of Lawrence Bragg (Eds.: J. M. Thomas, D. C. Phillips), Science Reviews Ltd, London, 1990, p. 115
65. "A dynamical model of crystal structure":W. L. Bragg, J. F. Nye, Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 1947, 190, 474.
66. "The art of talking about science": W. L. Bragg, Mar. Technol. 1967, 4, 258.
67. "The spirit of science": W. L. Bragg, Proc. R. Soc. Edinburgh Sect. A 1967, 67, 303.
68. "What makes a scientist":W. L. Bragg, Proc. R. Inst. G. B. 1969, 42, 397.
69. A more complete list is given in J. M. Thomas, "Picking winners: W. H. and W. L. Bragg at the Royal Institution", Notes and Records of R. Soc. 2011, 65, 163.
70. a) E.W. Hughes received his research training at the Baker Laboratory, Cornell University. Apart from assisting WLB in preparing for publication the Atomic Structure of Minerals (Ithaca, 1937)
71. He also assisted another Baker Lecturer, Linus Pauling, in the production for press of The Nature of the Chemical Bond (Ithaca, 1939).
72. His crystallographic achievements were considerable. He was the first to introduce, in 1941, the use of the "least squares" fitting of crystallographic data. In 1964 he and his graduate studentW. N. Lipscomb, who later won the Nobel Prize, further pursued the method of least squares to crystal structure refinement. b)
73. E. W. Hughes in Patterson and Pattersons (Eds.: J. P. Glusker, B. K. Patterson, M. Rossi), International Union of Crystallography and Oxford University Press, 1987.
74. H. F. Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979.