Crystallography discovered

The field of crystallography started with the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery in 1901. Max von Laue followed this by investigating the interaction of X-rays with crystals producing a diffraction pattern and he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1914.The story of crystallography dates back to 1912. German physicist Max von Laue and colleagues were experimenting with mysterious X-rays – scientists were still not entirely sure if they were electromagnetic waves like light and radio waves – and various crystals.The use of X-ray diffraction, first pioneered in 1912 by father and son William and Lawrence Bragg, enabled us to probe the structure of molecules, and heralded the scientific study of crystals, leading to an understanding of their atomic arrangements at a fundamental level.Crystallography as a science has a long and venerable history going back to the 17 th century when the sheer beauty of the symmetry of crystals suggested an underlying order of some kind. For the next three centuries, our knowledge of what crystals actually were was based on conjecture and argument, with a few simple experiments thrown in.