William Bragg pioneered, with his son Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971), the technique of X-ray crystallography. Bragg was brought up in England and studied at Cambridge with J. J. Thomson. For many years, he concentrated on lecturing, but after giving a lecture on radioactivity in Adelaide, Australia (1904), he became inspired to begin research into this area. He moved to Leeds (1909) and in 1912, with his son, set out to determine the structure of crystals from their X-ray diffraction patterns. Using instrument-making skills he had learned in Australia, Bragg constructed the first X-ray spectrometer in 1913, and shared the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics with his son. Bragg became Professor of Physics at University College London in 1915 a was subsequently appointed Director of the Royal Institution. He was knighted in 1920. The Braggs' revolutionary technique was later used to deduce the structures of diamonds, penicillin and DNA.
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