1. A long history

Abstract

‘A long history’ explains that it was during the 17th-century Enlightenment that saw the systematic study of crystals or ‘crystallography’ by key scientists including Johannes Kepler, Robert Hooke, Christian Huygens, Nicolas Steno, and Abbé René-Just Haüy—the true father of crystallography, who postulated that crystals must be made up of regular arrangements of polyhedral units. The 19th century saw new theories of crystals with the identification of thirty-two crystal classes, fourteen Bravais lattices, and 230 possible space groups. A new era of crystallography emerged with the discovery of X-ray diffraction by crystals by Max Theodor Felix Laue. William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg went on to identify many crystal structures.