William and Lawrence Bragg, Father and Son: The Most Extraordinary Collaboration in Science

  • John Jenkin
Oxford University Press: 2007. 474 pp. £35 9780199235209 | ISBN: 978-0-1992-3520-9

William Bragg and his son Lawrence Bragg shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915 for their joint development of X-ray crystallography. Lawrence was then 25 years old, and remains the youngest scientist to win a Nobel prize. X-ray crystallography transformed molecular structure determination in the physical and biological sciences, and both Braggs went on to long and successful careers in their respective laboratories and as public spokesmen for British science.

Beyond the usual obituaries and reminiscences, surprisingly little has been written about this unusual father–son scientific team. William Bragg is the focus of an affectionate but partial biography by his daughter. In 2004, Graeme Hunter wrote a much more substantial biography of Lawrence Bragg. John Jenkin's new book is the first joint biography of the two men, which puts their work on X-ray crystallography into a familial, as well as a scientific, context.

Born in 1862, William Bragg studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 1885, he was appointed professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Adelaide in Australia, where he became a key member of the nascent intellectual community in South Australia's capital. He married into the colonial élite, and began to establish both a family — Lawrence was born in 1890, Robert Charles in 1892 and Gwendolen Mary in 1907 — and his scientific career.

Professional interactions between Lawrence Bragg (top) and his father (bottom) were often fraught. Credit: TOPFOTO; SCIENCE MUSEUM/SSPL

William's first research, on radioactivity, brought him into contact with Ernest Rutherford and other luminaries of the new physics. Working in antipodean isolation, Bragg relied on advocates in the European and North American research communities to engage with and promote his work. His controversial 'neutral pair' interpretation of X- and γ-rays involved him in debate in the pages of Nature and elsewhere in 1908. This brought him to wider notice and back to Britain. In 1909, he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Leeds, UK, where he continued his research on radiation.

Educated initially under his father's auspices at the University of Adelaide, Lawrence Bragg then studied maths and physics at the Universityof Cambridge, UK, followed by research work there in J. J. Thomson's Cavendish Laboratory on the eve of the First World War. During this period, Lawrence and his father drew on work by Max von Laue and others to develop the theory and technique of X-ray diffraction. Their pioneering research on crystal structures, and thereby the Nobel prize, followed. Neither Bragg travelled to Stockholm to collect their prize as both were involved in war research: William worked on submarine detection, Lawrence on sound ranging. They were the lucky ones; Robert Bragg died at Gallipoli in 1915.

The crystallography work is the climax of Jenkin's detailed account of the Braggs' early careers. The bulk of William and Lawrence Bragg, Father and Son focuses on the family's life in Australia. Jenkin, himself from Adelaide, has assiduously mined Australian and British archives and gives us a wonderfully rich picture of the Braggs in Adelaide — a useful corrective to later UK-centred accounts. Although only one of the 19 chapters is devoted to the prizewinning collaboration, Jenkin draws on unpublished material to throw some new light on this work.

Despite a slight tendency to romanticize the Braggs, Jenkin deals effectively with the difficulties of being on the geographical margins of a research community and of establishing credibility from a position of intellectual isolation. Brief comparisons with analogous academics working in other fields might have added a broader sense of perspective here. He also opens for debate the issue of relations between father and son over the allocation of credit for X-ray crystallography. Lawrence seems to have felt unjustly treated, and professional and social contacts with his father were often fraught. Again, a comparative study — on the atomic physicists J. J. Thomson and his son George Paget Thomson, for example — might have helped us to get a better sense of the validity of Jenkin's argument.

In 1915, William accepted the professorship of physics at University College, London, from where he hoped to play a more prominent part in national scientific administration. In 1923, he became director of the Royal Institution. There, he oversaw the growth of X-ray crystallographic research and what is now called public engagement until his death in 1942. He was one of the most prominent spokesmen for science in the interwar period, and president of the Royal Society between 1935 and 1940.

Notwithstanding its early brilliance, most of Lawrence's career came after the events described in the book. In 1919, he succeeded Rutherford as professor of physics at the University of Manchester, UK, and created his own research school to study the X-ray crystallography of inorganic molecules. After a brief period as director of the National Physical Laboratory, UK, he again followed Rutherford to become head of the Cavendish Laboratory. There, he encouraged the efflorescence of molecular biology, which led to the elaboration of the structure of DNA in 1953.

Given all this, and his emphasis on the father–son relationship, it is a pity that Jenkin squeezes the entirety of the Braggs' post-1920 careers into two short chapters, and that he chooses to use his brief epilogue to quarrel with Hunter's recent interpretation of Lawrence's relationships with his parents. Perhaps there is scope for a follow-up volume dealing more fully with the Braggs' later careers and the elaboration of Jenkin's views of the darker side of this 'extraordinary collaboration'.