Commission on Powder Diffraction

Arthur Wilson, one of the world’s leading crystallographers for almost half a century and a pioneer of powder diffractometry, died at his home in Cambridge on 1 July, in his 81st year. Arthur James Cochran Wilson was born in Nova Scotia on 28 November 1914 and started his academic career at Dalhousie University, Halifax, where he obtained an MSc in 1936. He then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a PhD there in 1938. While at MIT he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship which enabled him to go to St John’s College and the Cavendish Laboratory in 1938, the year in which Sir Lawrence Bragg succeeded Lord Rutherford as the Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge. During the remaining two years of his Scholarship, Wilson made accurate measurements of the thermal expansion of A1 and Pb, which led to the award of his second PhD in 1942. It was through his work at the Cavendish Laboratory, and the influence of Bragg and Henry Lipson, who was effectively in charge of the laboratory during the war years, that Wilson acquired a life-long interest in powder diffraction and in X-ray crystallography generally.