Pre-1962

This extract from 50 Years of X-ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald and published in 1962, recounts the early development of crystallography in this region.

Spain

Within a year after Laue's discovery F. Pardillo gave a report on it and on the first work of the Braggs to the Royal Society of Natural History (Bol. 1913, 13, 336), and two years later (1915) Blas Cabrera wrote a similar report in the Anales Soc. Esp. Fis. y Quim. 13, 7. It took, however, another ten years before the new experimental technique was actually introduced in Spain, first at the Physics Department of the University in Madrid, but soon after, and on a larger scale at the Instituto National de Física y Química which had meanwhile been established with the help of the International Education Board (Rockefeller) in Madrid. Here J. Palacios assembled a group of keen young workers to whom he lectured and for whom he invited guests from abroad. A Weissenberg camera was built in the workshop of the institute from the drawings which Hengstenberg had provided, and he and Wierl, both from H. Mark's laboratory in Ludwigshafen, initiated electron diffraction which was taken up by L. Brú. J. Garrido, O. Foz, L. Rivoir and R. Salvin worked together with Palacios on structure determinations of inorganic and organic crystals and on the perfection of the Fourier methods of analysis. The Civil War brought all this to a near standstill from 1935 onwards. The same is true for the work which F. Pardillo had inaugurated quite independently and without external help in the mineralogy department of the university in Barcelona.

A revival took place after the Second World War, and there were considerable shifts of location of the scientists. L. Brú who had no X-ray instrumentation as long as he was professor of physics at La Laguna in the Canaries, was appointed to the physics chair at the University of Sevilla in 1949, and there, gathering some of his former collaborators around him, he began work on structure problems. In 1956 he came in the same capacity to the University of Madrid and is continuing both X-ray and electron diffraction there with an increasing number of co-workers.

L. Rivoir heads the X-ray department in the converted Instituto National de Física y Química, now Instituto de Física 'Alonso de Santa Cruz'.

The most active among the Spanish crystallographers is J. L. Amoros who after graduating at the university in Barcelona in 1942 worked there in the Instituto Lucas Mallada of the Higher Research Council (CSIC) before becoming the professor of crystallography in Madrid. Together with his numerous co-workers he is investigating structures as well as physical properties of crystals and the methods of their analysis. Interesting and useful publications have been issued by this group which provide the new generations of students with texts to study.

It should be mentioned that also J. Garrido and J. Orland published in 1946 a book Los rayos X y la estructura fina de los cristales which forms a good introduction to the subject and contains some methods developed by the authors.

A Crystallographic Society was formed in 1950 with some 35 members; in 1960 membership had risen to 60. In 1960 an Ibero-American Association for Crystallography was founded with the intent of tying together crystallographic research in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Spain.

First published for the International Union of Crystallography 1962 by N.V.A. Oosthoek's Uitgeversmaatschappij, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Digitised 1999 for the IUCr XVIII Congress, Glasgow, Scotland
© 1962, 1999 International Union of Crystallography