FUNDAMENTALS OF X-RAY FLUORESCENCE - Total-Reflection X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis and Related Methods - page 3

Figure1.1. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895 (reproduced with permission of the“Deutsches
Röntgenmuseum”in Lennep, Germany).
(X-ray diffraction) applicable to material analysis. Table 1.1 enumerates well-
known and renowned scientists. Most of them came from Great Britain and
Germany and almost all of them won the Nobel Prize in physics.
Hendrik Lorentz found the dispersion of X-rays and studied the influence of
magnetic fields on rapidly moving charged particles by the“Lorentz force,”
which 50 years later has built the basis for beamlines at synchrotron facilities.
Lord Rayleigh detected the coherent scattering of X-rays, and Philipp Lenard
investigated cathode rays while Sir J.J. Thomson verified them as negatively
charged electrons. Lord Ernest Rutherford created his well-known model of
atoms containing a positive nucleus and several negative electrons. Max von
Laue, Friedrich, and Knipping showed the diffraction of X-rays by the lattice of
crystalline copper sulfate [2] and hereby proved both the wave nature of X-rays
and simultaneously the atomic structure of crystals.
In 1913, Sir William Henry and William Lawrence Bragg—father and son—
built the first X-ray spectroscope as demonstrated in Figure 1.2 [3,4]. It
consisted of a cathode-ray tube with a Mo anode, a goniometer with a revolving
rock-salt crystal in the center, and a photographic film on the inside wall of a