History of Crystallography

These pages contain references to articles published in 'Crystallography News' since 1995 and to other places on the World Wide Web which have information on famous crystallographers,including:

a list of Nobel Prize Winners in Crystallography,
a list of dates and locations of past meetings of the BCA and ECM and Congresses of the IUCr,
a 'Time-Line' of significant events in British Crystallography
an essay by Max Perutz on the Founding of the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge
Obituaries and News of members, former BCA Council officers and members
Links to other historical sites on the Internet
a short bibliography .

Please send news of any other history, or comments on these pages to the

BCA Crystallography News page WebMaster [email protected]

This Page last updated 30 May 2006

Articles in Crystallography News

These are listed in order of publication

Sept 95 page 26-27: My Contacts with Paul von Groth Arnold Beevers
June 96 page 50: The Crum Brown Beevers museum Arnold Beevers
Dec 96 page 51-52: Archives of crystallographers NUARCS
March 97 page 16: The Braggs in Leeds in 1915
June 97: page 16 Helen Megaw 90th Birthday; page 50 Crystallography on a carpet made for the Festival of Britain
Sept 97: page 16 - Rosalind Franklin and the Double helix - report of a lecture by Sir Aaron Klug; page 20 - origins of BCA named lectures, Bragg, Hodgkin, Lonsdale; page 63 - List of Nobel Prize Winners associated with Crystallography
June 98: page 30 - Arnold Beevers at 90; page 34 - Fifty years of neutron scattering - a celebration meeeting to mark the 80th birthday of George Bacon; page 44 - Microscopic Structure: minerals their derivatives and applications
Sept 98: page 36 Blue Plaques for Physicists; page 16 50 years of computing in Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology in Manchester
Mar 99: page 14 50th Anniversary of the Biomolecular Structure Laboratory at Birkbeck College, London; The Icy waters of Crystal Sound, places in the Antarctic named for people who worked on the structure of ice.
Sep 01: Page 6 Royal Society of Chemistry Landmarks
and one presented in May 2001 commemmorating the work of Dorothy Hodgkin; Page 10 Crystallography and Antiquities (not on-line yet)
Mar 05: Page 6 40 years of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
Dec 05: Page 20 Reprint of a radio broadcast by Sir William Bragg in 1945 published no 95 December 2005; Page 30 A brief note on Nicolai Steno

British Institutions which may have archives

Oxford University maintains a long list of museums at URL http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/index.html. Click here to access it if you do not find what you are looking for in the rest of this page.

In or near London
- The Natural History Museum, London
- The Science Museum, London
- The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1X 4BS
- The Royal Society, London
- Rebuilding of the first electronic computer, COLOSSUS by the Bletchley Park Trust who also have exhibits on cryptography and the ENIGMA encoding machine used in the Second World War.
In Oxford
- Museum of the History of Science
  (Has a copy of the 'Oxford Science Walk' on-line for you to download tel: (01865) 277 280)
- University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road
Elsewhere in the UK
- National Museum of Scotland
- National Museum of Wales
- National Cataloging Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists; details of their holdings on crystallographers was published in issue no 56 of 'Crystallography News' December 1996, Page 52
- Institute of Physics Blue Plaques scheme
- Celebration of 50 years of computing rebuild of 1st stored program computer, 'The Baby', first built in 1948
- The Manchester Museum of Science and Industry

Other historical sites outside the UK

American Institute of Physics, AIP, has useful links to Web exhibits on history of physics and astronomy. They also link to the project on Women in Physics, which includes pages on women crystallographers such as Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale and Helen Megaw. The AIP has a Centre for the History of Physics, which has now put on the WWW their International Catalogue of Sources for the History of Physics and Allied Sciences, (ICOS), which lists over 500 repositories worldwide containing papers of individuals and other relevant historical material. Further informatio from The Center for the History of Physics,AIP, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, Maryland, MD 20740, USA email: [email protected]
Posters from the Centennial exhibition of the American Physical Society (APS)APS 100
The Electronic Nobel Museum (ENM) which aims to provide autobiographies, portraits, and essays relating to achievements recognized by the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace, and by the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Bibliography

These are books on the history of crystallography, including the lives of famous crystallographers, those on the discovery of the DNA double helix are in another file.

Published by the IUCr
- Historical Atlas of Crystallography. publisher IUCr 1990 editor J.Lima De Faria
- 50 years of X-ray Diffraction edited by P.P.Ewald 1962
  also in PDF format on the 1999 Glasgow IUCr Congress CD
- Crystallography Across the Sciences editor Henk Schenk a re-issue of Section 1 Act Cryst (A) Nov 98 a commemmorative volume celebrating 50 years of the IUCr
Published by the American Crystallographic Association
- Crystallography in North America 1983 edited by D.McLachlan and J.P.Glusker with contributions from 91 authors
The Royal Society publishes volumes with biographies of Fellows. For a particular Fellow, apply to the Librarian, Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, London
W.H. and W.L. Bragg
- Fifty Years of X-ray Diffraction, P.P.Ewald editor, pub. 1962 International Union of Crystallography
- William Henry Bragg 1862 - 1942, G.M.Caroe, Pub. 1978 Cambridge University Press
- Biographical memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 25, 75 - 143, 1979. This includes biographies of several other FRS as well as 70 pages by D.Phillips on William Lawrence Bragg including a list of his publications
- The Bragg Family in Adelaide. A Pictorial Celebration by John Jenkin 1986 pub. The University of Adelaide ISBN 085816 627
- Selections and Reflections: the Legacy of Sir Lawrence Bragg (editors J.M.Thomas and D. Phillips) pub 1990 by Science Reviews Ltd, Northwood, UK.
- Science is not a quiet Life: Unravelling the Atomic Mechanism of Haemoglobin,M. Perutz, pub. 1997 World Scientific publishing Co. Singapore
- 'I wish I'd made you angry earlier', Perutz, M, Pub. Oxford University Press 1998 has a chapter on 'How W.L.Bragg invented X-ray analysis'
- 'Light is a Messenger: The Life and Science of William Lawrence Bragg'
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Collected Works of Dorothy Hodgkin (in 3 Volumes) published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, 1996 ISBN 81-7296-020-4 has copies of addresses presented at her funeral and memorial service.
Dorothy Hodgkin and Linus Pauling. A tribute. Talks presented at the Montreal meeting of the ACA 25 July 1995 printed by University of California, Los Angeles, 1996
Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life biography by Georgina Ferry, reviewed in 'Crystallography News' Dec 98

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