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William Lawrence Bragg shared a remarkable two-year collaboration with his father and fellow physicist, William Henry Bragg, during which they founded the new science of X-ray crystallography. The methods developed by this father-son team made it possible to explore the atomic structure of matter very precisely and in great detail. The Braggs shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics for their work.
Bragg was born in Adelaide, Australia. His father was professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Adelaide; his mother, Gwendoline Todd Bragg, was the daughter of Sir Charles Todd, South Australia's postmaster general and government astronomer. Bragg had a brother one year younger than he, Robert, who was killed at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I, and a sister, Gwendolen, seventeen years his junior. The children's parents were a contrast; Gwendolen later wrote in the biography William Henry Bragg that their father wanted his children to be absolutely free and avoided advising them on what they should do, whereas their mother "always knew exactly what one ought to do, and said so." Foreshadowing the field of the Braggs' future work, Bragg's father built a primitive X-ray machine within weeks after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's 1896 announcement of his discovery of the rays.
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