Lawrence Bragg at Manchester and the National Physical Laboratory

The Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University, Sir Henry Miers, having been Professor of Crystallography, was keen to develop the discipline. In his words,

Lawrence Bragg, although only 29, was the obvious choice to succeed Rutherford as the Langworthy Professor of Physics at the University in 1919, but it was to prove a real challenge. He had never taught physics and now was in charge of a large department which had become a leader in the dynamic field of nuclear physics under Rutherford. Despite a rocky ride in getting on top of teaching and the management of the growing laboratory during his first few years, he now had his own research laboratory and concentrated upon making the discipline of crystallography an exact quantitative science. This was to be his major and distinguished contribution during his Manchester years. As expressed by David Phillips,

His research programme got off to an excellent start with his acquisition of a new Xray spectrometer and the gift of a state-of-the-art Coolidge X-ray tube from the General Electric Company at Schenectady. From his continuing studies of crystalline structures, he developed the concept of the sizes of the common ions so that interatomic distances in atomic compounds could be determined by an additive law; these dimensions agreed quite well with the measured atomic distances (Bragg, 1921).