The Award of the Franklin Medal to Sir William Bragg and Dr. John F. StevensSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 30, No. 6 (Jun., 1930), pp. 572-574Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/14732 .

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572 THE SCIENTIFIC -MONTH LY

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DR. TOH F. STEEN

IN 1913 MIr. Sa4Inmel Insull, of Chi- cago, gave to the Franiklin Institute a certain suim for the fouinding of the Franklin Aedal to be awarded from time to time in recoonition of the total con- tributions of inldividuals to science or to the applications of plhysical science to industry. The medcal is of gold, having on one side a nle(lallion of Benjamin Frankliin done from the Thomas Sully portrait, the original of which is in the possession of the institute.

This year two mle(lals were awarded- one to Dr. Jolhn F. Stevens in recogni-

tion of hixs unifying solutions of widely varyingo andl difficult engineeringa prob- lems met in the planning of the 0rreat Panama Canal, of the marked power showvn by him in the organization of the engineering forces which later btuilt that canal anld of his eminent success in the location, construction and adniinistra- tion of railroads in this country anid in foreign lands; the other to Sir AWilliam Bragg in recognition of a life work in the study of X-rays and radioactivity in the course of which lie made funda- mental contributions to that realm of

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^- _.... .1 t:051 DR. JOHN F. STEVENS

physics, of hiis development of a method of (leterminiog molecular and crystal strnietnre by the reflection of X-rays and of Ihis fruitful guidance of the Davy- Faraday Research Laboratory and of the Roval Institution of Great Britain.

Dr. Stevens wN-as born at West Gardi- ner, Maine, in 1853. His first engineer- ing experience was with a firm of engi- neers in Lewiston, butl he was soon drawn to the West. From 1874 to al- most the present time he has been asso- ciated wNith many American railroads, among which may be mentioned the Denver and Rio Grande; the Chicago, Mlilwaukee and St. Paul; the Canadian

Pacific; the Great Northern, ancd the New York, New Haven and Hartford. His list of honors fromi governments is a long one, including the Distinguished Service AMedal of the U'nited States. He is an officer of the Leoion of Honor of France. In 1925. he w0-as awarded the John Fritz Medal, the highest honor American engineers can pay to one of their number.

A few of his splendid achievements are as follows. Early in 1889 he entered the service of the Great Northern Rail- way and was assigned the task of locat- ing its line over the Rocky AMountains. This he did whenl he discovered the

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574 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

Marios Pass, which has the lowest grades in the northern United States and is the straightest route from the head waters of the Mississippi to Portland and Puget Sound.

In 1905 Dr. Stevens was called by our government to take charge of the work of constructing the Panama Canal. He spent eighteen months in the Canal Zone as chief engineer; he brought order out of chaos, planned all the details of con- struction and organization and started the vast machine going with a contented and healthy army of 30,000 men.

Sir William Bragg was born at Wig- ton, England, in 1862. His collegiate education was obtained at Trinity Col- lege, Cambridge. In 1886 he was appointed professor of mathematics and physics in the University of Adelaide, Australia, and while there began his in- vestigations in the field of radioactivity. In 1909 he was appointed Cavendish professor at Leeds University. In 1915 he became Quain professor of physics at the University of London, where he remained until his election in 1923 to his present position as director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Ful- lerian professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution and director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. He is a fellow and a Rumford medalist

of the Royal Society. In 1915 he re- ceived the Nobel Prize for physics, which distinction he shared with his son, Pro- fessor W. Lawrence Bragg.

Sir William 's extensive and valuable studies have been in the modern and im- portant fields of radioactivity, X-rays and crystal structure, in fact, they are of such a fundamental nature that his name is a household word to all students in the exact sciences.

In radioactivity his experiments on the determination of the ranges of the alpha particles from various radioactive substances threw much light on the me- chanics of ionization in gases and on the laws of absorption of these rays by matter.

In the field of X-rays and crystal structure he showed that the cleavage faces of a crystal reflect X-rays accord- ing to the same laws that apply in or- dinary optical reflection, and he derived the formula known as the Bragg equa- tion for space lattices. Using this equa- tion and with observations made on numerous crystals by means of an X-ray spectrometer of his own design he deter- mined the various distances between the atomic planes in these crystals and the nature of the atoms in these planes. In this way he put crystallography on an exact and measurable foundation.

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