Britain
William Lawrence Bragg
1890–1971 Physicist; developer of sound ranging
Born in Adelaide, Lawrence Bragg shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his father, William Henry Bragg, for their work on X-ray crystallography. He was 25, and remains the youngest Nobel laureate in the sciences. As an army officer he developed the technique of sound ranging, which located enemy guns by timing the arrival of the sound of firing at an array of microphones, working with W. S. Tucker. He won the Military Cross. By 1918 sound ranging, with flash spotting and air reconnaissance, allowed British artillery to destroy a large fraction of the German batteries before major attacks. After the war he returned to research and later directed the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.