Lawrence Bragg's elbow injury at six in North Adelaide begins link with father William on X-rays and Nobel Prize

Young Lawrence Bragg (at front, left) and his brother Bob (at front, right) in a family portrait in 1897 at Adelaide Observatory on West Terrace, Adelaide city, where his grandfather Charles Todd (seated at right) was South Australia's astronomical and meteorological observer. William Bragg is second from left in the back row; his wife Gwendoline and her brother Dr Charlie Todd seated second and third from left.
Image courtesy State LIbrary of South Australia

X-rays – central to father and son William and Lawrence Braggs’ shared Nobel Prize for physics in 1915 – played their part in a domestic drama during their South Australian era at the family’s home on LeFevre Terrace in North Adelaide in 1896.

Six-year-old Lawrence Bragg was riding his tricycle when his younger brother Robert (Bob) jumped on him from behind and overturned them both. They both fell on Lawrence’s left elbow.

Lawrence was taken to his father's laboratory at Adelaide University where William Bragg was physics professor. William Bragg wanted to Xray the elbow with the  elementary apparatus he'd received from England and was being developed with the help of his father-in-law Charles Todd, South Australia's astronomical and meteorological observer, head of the electric telegraph department and postmaster general; and university laboratory technician Arthur Rogers. X rays had only been discovered in the previous year by Wilhelm Röntgen in Germany.

Lawrence was frightened by the flashing sparks and the smell of ozone from the X-ray apparatus but he was persuaded to submit to the exposure only after his brother Bob had a radiograph taken. Lawrence's left elbow was shown to be shattered.

Long-time Bragg family friend and doctor Alfred Lendon thought the arm should be allowed to set stiff but Dr Charlie Todd, Lawrence’s uncle and a son of Charles Todd, decided to do better. Every few days, Lawrence was put under ether and his arm flexed to form a new joint. The treatment was largely successful, although Lawrence’s left arm was a little crooked and shortened from then on.

Also in June, 1896, as part of his public demonstrations of X-rays in Adelaide, William Bragg had his hand photographed in X ray by his Adelaide University apparatus maker Arthur Rogers. It was claimed that the X-ray showed the injury that William Bragg had sustained to the tip of the little finger of his left hand, when it had been all but cut off by the turnip-chopping machine on the Cumberland farm of his boyhood in England. Modern radiographers were less certain that this detail would have been shown.