Sir William Henry Bragg & Sir William Lawrence Bragg

Sir William Henry Bragg and Sir William Lawrence Bragg

Used with permission of Maiken Naylor, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA, http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/sel/exhibits/stamps

Sir William Henry Bragg (1862-1942) and Sir William Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971), father and son, were intensely interested in the X-ray diffraction work done by von Laue. They used his discovery to study crystal structure and developed the X-ray spectrometer. Their Nobel prize in physics followed von Laue's by a year, in 1915. The Royal Institute of Chemistry stamp shows the crystal structure of salt, as determined by WLB, and used by WHB to determine X-ray wavelengths.