--- title: "Timeline of crystallography" chunk: 3/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_crystallography" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" date_saved: "2026-05-05T16:17:33.515741+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- 1946 - James Batcheller Sumner shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his discovery that enzymes can be crystallized". 1947 - Lewis Stephen Ramsdell systematically classified the polytypes of silicon carbide, and introduced the Ramsdell notation. 1948 - The first congress and general assembly of the International Union of Crystallography was held at Harvard University. 1948 - Acta Crystallographica was founded by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) with P.P. Ewald as its first editor. 1948 - Ernest O. Wollan and Clifford Shull published the first series of neutron diffraction experiments for crystallography performed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 1948 - George Pake used solid state NMR spectroscopy to determine hydrogen atom distances in a single crystal of gypsum. 1949 - Clifford Shull opened a new field of magnetic crystallography based on neutron diffraction. 1950 - Jerome Karle and Herbert A. Hauptman introduced formulae for phase determination known as direct methods. 1951 - Johannes Martin Bijvoet and his colleagues, using anomalous scattering, confirmed Emil Fischer's arbitrary assignment of absolute configuration, in relation to the direction of optical rotation of polarized light, was correct in practice. 1951 - Linus Pauling determined the structure of the α-helix and the β-sheet in polypeptide chains. 1951 - Alexei Vasilievich Shubnikov published Symmetry and antisymmetry of finite figures which opened up the field of antisymmetry in magnetic structures. 1952 - David Sayre suggested that the phase problem could be more easily solved by having at least one more intensity measurement beyond those of the Bragg peaks in each dimension. This concept is understood today as oversampling. 1952 - Geoffrey Wilkinson and Ernst Otto Fischer determined the structure of ferrocene, the first metallic sandwich compound, for which they won the 1973 Nobel prize in Chemistry. The structure was soon refined by Jack Dunitz, Leslie Orgel, and Alexander Rich. 1953 - Arne Magnéli introduced the term homologous series to describe polytypes of transition metal oxides that exhibit crystallographic shear structures. 1953 - Determination of the structure of DNA by three British teams, for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 (Franklin's death in 1958 made her ineligible for the award). 1954 - Ukichiro Nakaya's book Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial, dedicated to the modern study of snow crystals, is published. 1954 - Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances"." 1956 - Durward W. J. Cruickshank developed the theoretical framework for anisotropic displacement parameters, also known as the thermal ellipsoid. 1956 - James Menter published the first electron microscope images showing the lattice structure of a material. 1958 - William Burton Pearson published A Handbook of Lattice Spacings and Structures of Metals and Alloys, where he introduced the Pearson symbols for crystal structure types. 1959 - Norio Kato and Andrew Richard Lang observed Pendellösung fringes in X-ray diffraction from silicon and quartz. The observation of similar fringes in neutron diffraction was made by Clifford Shull in 1968. 1960 - John Kendrew determined the structure of myoglobin for which he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 1960 - After many years of research, Max Perutz determined the structure of haemoglobin for which he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 1960 - Lester Germer and his coworkers at Bell Labs using a flat phosphor screen for the first modern low-energy electron diffraction camera combined with ultra-high vacuum, the start of quantitative surface crystallography. 1962 - Alan Mackay demonstrated that there exists close packing of spheres to yield icosahedral structures. 1962 - Michael Rossmann and David Blow laid the foundation for the molecular replacement approach which provides phase information without requiring additional experimental effort. 1962 - Max Perutz and John Kendrew shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for their studies of the structures of globular proteins", namely haemoglobin and myoglobin respectively 1962 - James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material," specifically for their determination of the structure of DNA. 1963 - Isabella Karle developed the symbolic addition procedure in direct methods for inverting X-ray diffraction data. 1963 - Jürg Waser introduced restrained least square method, also known as regularized least squares, for crystallographic structure fitting. 1964 - Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances." The substances included penicillin and vitamin B12. 1965 - David Chilton Phillips, Louise Johnson and their co-workers published the structure of Lysozyme, the first enzyme to have its structure determined. 1965 - Olga Kennard established the Cambridge Structural Database. 1967 - Hugo Rietveld invented the Rietveld refinement method for computation of crystal structures. 1968 - Erwin Félix Lewy-Bertaut introduced magnetic space groups to account for the spin ordering of magnetic structures observed in neutron crystallography. 1968 - Aaron Klug and David DeRosier used electron microscopy to visualise the structure of the tail of bacteriophage T4, a common virus, thus signalling a breakthrough in macromolecular structure determination. 1968 - Dorothy Hodgkin, after 35 years of work, finally deciphered the structure of insulin. 1969 - Benno P. Schoenborn conducted the first structural study of macromolecules (myoglobin) by neutron diffraction at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. 1970 - Albert Crewe demonstrated imaging of single atoms in a scanning transmission electron microscopy. 1971 - Establishment of the Protein Data Bank (PDB). At PDB, Edgar Meyer develops the first general software tools for handling and visualizing protein structural data. 1971 - Gerd Rosenbaum, Kenneth Holmes, and Jean Witz first discussed the potential of synchrotron X-ray diffraction for biological applications. 1972 - The first quantitative matching of atomic scale images and dynamical simulations was published by J. G. Allpress, E. A. Hewat, A. F. Moodie and J. V. Sanders. 1972 - Michael Glazer established the classification of octahedral tilting patterns in perovskite crystal structures, later also known as the Glazer tilts. 1973 - Alex Rich's group published the first report of a polynucleotide crystal structure - that of the yeast transfer RNA (tRNA) for phenylalanine. 1973 - Geoffrey Wilkinson and Ernst Fischer shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for their pioneering work, performed independently, on the chemistry of the organometallic, so called sandwich compounds", specifically the structure of ferrocene. 1976 - Douglas L. Dorset and Herbert A. Hauptman used direct methods to solve crystal structures from electron diffraction data. 1976 - Boris Delaunay, building on his work in the 1930s, proved that the regularity of a system of points, an (r, R) system or Delone set, can be established by postulating the points' congruence within a sphere of a defined finite radius. 1976 - William Lipscomb won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his studies on the structure of boranes illuminating problems of chemical bonding." 1978 - Stephen C. Harrison provided the first high-resolution structure of a virus: tomato bushy stunt virus which is icosahedral in form. 1978 - Günter Bergerhoff and I. David Brown initiated the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database.