Nobel prize winners from Market Harborough.
This medicine box appears in the ‘Across the Counter’ case in Harborough Museum, and shows many of the remedies people bought before the National Health Service, from places such as pharmacies.
William Bragg moved to Market Harborough in 1851, and had a pharmacy on Adam and Eve Street. He built Catherwood House on The Square in 1876. This building replaced a Georgian vicarage. His nephew, also William Bragg, was born in Cumberland in 1862 but when he was seven years old, his mother died and he went to live with his uncle in Market Harborough.
Sir W Bragg went to the Old Grammar School in Market Harborough, continuing onto King William’s College of the Isle of Man and later Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship. After being a professor of maths and physics at the University of Adelaide in Australia, Sir Bragg returned to Market Harborough in the early 20th century.
By 1913, Sir Bragg was working with his son, William Lawrence Bragg to find a way to examine the structure of crystals. The use of X-rays allowed them to see the structure of a diamond and in 1915 they received the Nobel Prize for X-ray crystallography. In 2015, their discovery and life in Harborough was marked with the Green Plaque on Catherwood House.
