Interests and instrument: a micro-history of object Wh.3469 (X-ray powder diffraction camera, ca. 1940)

This paper presents a micro-history of an object in the collection of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science (accession no. Wh.3469), with an emphasis on how Wh.3469 reflects a hybrid of two different interwar British X-ray crystallographic communities, namely those based in WL Bragg’s physics laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester and the Crystallographic Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. It explores connections between Wh.3469’s final design and construction and the different interests each community had in X-ray crystallography.