Some personal experiences in the international coordination of crystal diffractometry

X‐ray crystallography, like any good crystallization, grew from a few distinct nuclei. The first nucleus was the Laue‐Friedrich‐Knipping experiment in Munich. Hardly had the news of this new effect been given at the spring 1912 meeting of the Bavarian Academy of Science and found its way into the papers, before a second nucleation was induced in England. While Laud had explained the effect as one of diffraction of very short light waves by the regular lattice arrangement of scattering atoms, W. L. Bragg concluded from the shape of the Laud spots that they should be explained as an effect of reflection of waves on the internal atomic planes, an idea that led him at once to what is now known as Bragg’s Law. Thus it was the focusing property which gave the first clue to the Bragg version of the phenomenon, as published in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in November 1912.

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