Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Son of William Henry BRAGG and Gwendoline nee TODD

Professor W. L. Bragg, M.A., has been appointed to the Langworthy Chair of Physics, Manchester University. He is the son of Professor W. H. Bragg (who from 1885 to 1908 filled the Chair of Mathematics and Physics in the Adelaide University), and the grandson of the late Sir Charles Todd, F.R.S., - who was during many years Postmaster-General of South Australia. Professor W. L. Bragg was born in South Australia, and educated at St. Peter's College and the Adelaide University, where he graduated B.A. in 1908. In conjunction with his father, he was awarded, in 1915, the Nobel Prize, and also the Barnard Medal from Columbia University, for work on X-rays and crystals.  At Manchester he has succeeded Sir Ernest Rutherford, one of the most distinguished of living physicists, who is a native of New Zealand, and has recently taken the place of Sir J. J. Thomson, O.M., as Cavendish Professor at Cambridge.

PROEESSOR BRAGG'S
SUCCESS.
INTERESTING STUDIES
INTERRUPTED
One of the supreme tragedies of this war is the sacrifice of the lives of so many of our young men of brilliant scientific attainments, who have given up the study and the laboratory for the field (says a representative, of The London Daily News).
This point came out with particular empiasis when I called at the London University to congratulate Professor W.H. Bragg, F.R.S., upon is attainment this year of the Nobel Physics Prize for research in crystals and X-rays. This prize has been awarded to Professor Bragg and his son, Lieut. W. L. Bragg, jointly. Mr. Bragg, jun., is now out on the Flanders front, attached to the Royal Horse Artillery, where (fortunately) his scientific abilities are being applied in the direction of gunnery. He is one of the cleverest of our young scientists, but, like many another of his class, could not resist the call of the drum. Before the call came, however, he was in the midst of a problem the partial solving of which is more romantic than a romance. The tale of it as too long and too involved and complicated to attempt to explain it here. It began with certain discoveries in the mysteries of the formation of crystals made by a brilliant German — Professor Lave. He developed the theory that an X-ray is a phenomenon similar to a ray of light but produced by wave lengths many thousand times smaller than
the inconceivably small waves which are associated with a light.
'My son saw a simple way of putting it,' said the professor. 'Together we set to work on the problem, and hit upon a happy inspiration, which opened the way to all manner of experiments. Out of this we obtained the knowledge how the atoms in a crystal ore all arranged; to our astonishment it upset all the old set ideas of crystallography, and many other ideas as well. In this work Mr. Henry Gwyn Jefferys Moseley (son of the late Professor A. N. M. Moseley, of Oxford rendered magnificent assistance. Starting from a certain point of Lave's researches into the diffraction of X-rays in their passage through crystals, Mr. Moseley carried on further, with amazing results, and between us Mr. Moseley, my son, and myself— we polished up the rough diamond of Professor Lave (who himself got the Nobel Physics Prize in 1914) and opened up vistas the significance of which,
to my mind , is inconceivable. Standing, as I do, on the threshold of this wonder land, I can only gasp and wonder. And, continued the professor, with a sigh, "is the midst of this, to our great sadness, young Moseley, on the crest of the wave which his brilliance has done so much to raise, has been killed by a sniper's bullet is Gallipoli." It is strange that out of this unique quartet of scientists three of them should have gone to the wars.