Bragg, Sir William Lawrence, 1890-1971. Knight. Physicist.

William Lawrence Bragg was born the son of William Henry Bragg, physicist and Gwendoline Todd, in Adelaide, Australia, in 1890. As a child, he attended Queen's preparatory school and St Peter's College in Adelaide. He went to the University of Adelaide at the age of 15 in order to study mathematics and graduated in 1908 in physics and chemistry. In 1909 he came to England with his family and went to study at Cambridge. In 1910 he gained first class honours in part one of the mathematical Tripos and subsequently gained a first in part two of the physics Tripos in 1912. In 1914 he became a Fellow and lecturer in Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge. He began researching under J. J. Thomson and worked on the reflection of x-ray waves by planes of atoms in crystals, in order to reveal the position of atoms thus developing crystal analysis. The relationship between the angle of incidence and wavelength, and between parallel atomic planes is known as Bragg's Angle' orBragg's Law'. He worked on crystal structure and its arrangement in sodium and potassium. He also worked with his father, William Henry Bragg, particularly on the structure of diamond, resulting in a joint publication in 1915 called X-Rays and Crystal Structure. It was for this work with his father that he jointly won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1915, and at 25 years old, he remains the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize. During the First World War and until 1919, William Lawrence (he was known as Lawrence in order to distinguish him from his father) primarily served in the Royal Horse Artillery until he became Technical Adviser to the Map Section in order to research into sound ranging to locate enemy guns. In 1919 he became Langworthy Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester, a position he held until 1937. He set up the School of Crystallography at Manchester and introduced the study of atomic radii, x-ray diffraction, scattering atoms, analysing structures, branch of optics, order-disorder changes and metals, alloys and silicate. He developed quantitative crystallography and worked on the structure of minerals and later, protein. In 1921 he married Alice Hopkins and they had four children, Stephen Lawrence, David William, Margaret Alice and Patience Mary. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1921. In 1937 he became Director of the National Physics Laboratory, but only until 1938 when he became Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge. He held this position until 1953 having reorganised the Cavendish Laboratory into separate branches of physics. It was split into nuclear physics, low temperature physics, radio physics, crystallography and metal physics. Whilst at Cambridge, he realised the potential of using crystal analysis on living cells, after Max Perutz had shown him an x-ray photograph of haemoglobin. In the Second World War, Lawrence became a consultant to the sound ranging section of the army, and also to the Admiralty on underwater detection using sound waves (known as asdic or sonar). He was also on the Ministry of Supply Committee and assisted the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. In 1941 he went to Ottawa, Canada as a scientific liaison officer for the war effort. In 1941 he was knighted. From 1939 to 1943, he was President of the Institute of Physics, whereby he promoted x-ray research and also became the first President of the International Union of Crystallography. In 1947 he helped set up what became the Medical Research Council Laboratory of molecular biology at the Cavendish laboratory, Cambridge. Under his direction, Francis Crick and James Watson determined the double helix structure of DNA. In 1953 he became Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI). In 1954 he became Director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory at the RI, and developed it into a major centre for x-ray analysis. He was the first person to be denominated Director of the RI. He introduced corporate membership to the RI and performed lectures on television for the first time. He worked closely with Max Perutz and John Kendrew at Cambridge (who gained a Nobel Prize for their work on proteins) and under his guidance David Phillips (later Lord), determined the structure of lysozyme in 1965 which was the first enzyme to have its structure identified. Lawrence was Chairman of the Frequency Advisory Committee from 1958 to 1960. He retired from the RI in 1966, but continued to lecture there until 1971. He gained several medals in his career including the Hughes medal in 1931, the Royal Medal in 1946 and the Copley medal in 1966 from the Royal Society. He published many articles and books such as `The Diffraction of Short Electromagnetic Waves by a Crystal' in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1912; The Crystalline State in 1934 and others in journals such as Philosophical Magazine, Transactions of the Faraday Society and Proceedings of the Royal Society. Lawrence died near Waldringfield, Suffolk in 1971.