Domesticating the Crystal: Sir Lawrence Bragg and the Aesthetics of "X-ray Analysis"

James Elkins has identified a "tempting" historical coincidence, that X-ray crystallography originated in the same year that Picasso painted the cubist works Ma Jolie and the Aficionado.¹ Less cautiously, Bettyann Kevles asserts: "The cafés were abuzz in 1912 with news about X-ray crystallography."² It is understandable that Elkins and Kevles want to link these two revolutions in solid-state physics and artistic technique, for both cubism and X-ray crystallography rely on the analysis and juxtaposition of two-dimensional slices in order to examine the three-dimensional structure of common objects.

Few scholars, however, have been tempted by Elkins's coincidence. While considerable work has been done on the cultural impact of the X ray,³ of crystallography prior to 1912,⁴ and of the "crystal metaphor" in both poetry and biology,⁵ the actual use of X rays to study crystal structure has received much less attention from science studies than have other branches of modern physics. For instance, historical accounts of X-ray crystallography are largely written by its practitioners, and thus they make few attempts to put the discipline in the context of other scientific or artistic developments, cultural practices, or epistemic trends. Likewise, although one of X-ray crystallography's founders, the British physicist William Lawrence Bragg (1890–1971) (Fig. 1)⁶ died over thirty years ago, the first biography of Bragg has only recently been published.⁷

Yet Lawrence Bragg deserves wider attention not only for his contributions to physics and molecular biology, but also for his administrative role in postwar British science and his effectiveness as a science communicator. In this paper, I argue that attention to Bragg's writing reshapes existing hypotheses about gender and crystallography and about crystallography and modern art. Specifically, Bragg's rhetoric suggests an alternative explanation for the relative success of women in the field. It also demonstrates that analogies should be drawn not just between X-ray crystallography and cubism (or other art from 1912), but between X-ray crystallography and the decorative arts of an earlier period. Despite the formal similarities between cubism's and X-ray crystallography's treatment of space, Bragg's science displays many characteristics of what Jessica Feldman has called Victorian modernism.⁸

Most attempts to place X-ray crystallography in a broader cultural context have focused on the role of women in the field's early period. In Britain, X-ray crystallographers included a number of distinguished

Figure 1.

W. L. Bragg. © The Nobel Foundation.

researchers like Kathleen Lonsdale (who studied the benzene ring and served as president of the International Union of Crystallography), Rosalind Franklin (who made key contributions to the study of the structure of DNA), and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (who won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the structures of penicillin and vitamin B₁₂). Sharon Bertsch McGrayne therefore identifies British crystallography as a relatively welcoming field for women, in part because of a historical tradition encouraging aristocratic British women to own chemistry sets and grow crystals.⁹ Maureen Julian suggests that the newness of X-ray crystallography made it more open to women, and that the field was sufficiently interdisciplinary to attract women interested in more "prejudice[d]" disciplines like physics, mathematics, or computer science.¹⁰ Another, less encouraging, possibility is that because it provides structural information to other researchers, X-ray crystallography was seen as a "service rather than a discipline"¹¹ and thus as an acceptable pursuit for women. In fact, there is some evidence that it has been devalued precisely for seeming equitable: Julian shows that even though women represented only 14 percent of crystallographers in 1981, some still saw the area as "overrun" with and "too full" of women, and the field itself as feminine, akin to "'intellectual knitting.'"¹²

Both these historians claim that Bragg and his father, Sir William Henry Bragg, along with J. D. Bernal, deserve credit for the relative inclusiveness of their science. McGrayne writes that "Bernal and both...