ABSTRACT
In the modern industrial context, modern craftsmanship with all its noise and ugliness is giving food and clothing, warmth and interest, to millions who must otherwise die. Hand in hand with the notion of craftsmanship for William Bragg went that of social service and the relationship of scientific institutions to the individual and society at large. The Royal Institution under James Dewar had atrophied, especially during and after the Great War, and research at the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory had fallen away to almost nothing. William Henry Bragg was born on 2 July 1862 at Westward, in Cumberland, the son of Robert John Bragg, a young officer retired from the merchant navy, and Mary Wood, daughter of the local vicar. It was there too that with his son William Lawrence Bragg he invented the technique of X-ray crystallography, for which they jointly won the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics and their scientific fame.
