Birth of William Henry Bragg

William Henry Bragg was born on 2 July 1862 in Wigton. A British physicist, Bragg worked with his son, William Lawrence Bragg, on the use of X-rays to determine the structure of crystals. They developed the Bragg law, which relates the angle of reflection to the wavelength and the spacing of atomic planes, and built the first X-ray spectrometer. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, with the son still only twenty-five, the youngest laureate in the history of the prize. He worked at Adelaide in Australia, then at Leeds and University College London, and became director of the Royal Institution in London, where he also did much to popularize science.

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