In 1913, William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg used the X-ray spectrometer they had built and the diffraction law the younger Bragg had just derived to work out the atomic arrangement inside a crystal of sodium chloride, the first complete crystal structure ever solved. The result showed that common salt is not made of discrete molecules but of sodium and chlorine ions arranged in a continuous repeating lattice, establishing X-ray crystallography as a working method for determining how atoms are actually arranged inside a solid.
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Source William Henry Bragg (Britannica)
Source William Lawrence Bragg (Britannica)
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Source William Lawrence Bragg (Britannica)
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1. William Lawrence Bragg (Britannica)
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