The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1936 was awarded to Peter Debye "for his contributions to our knowledge of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases".
 

Von Laue and the two research scientists, Bragg father-and-son, showed how these interference phenomena could be utilized to determine the regular arrangement of the atoms in the crystals, and were therefore awarded the Nobel Prizes for Physics in 1914 and 1915. Debye has taken an effective share in the investigation of the phenomena which have arisen in the resultant field of research and has contributed by his important initiative to the development of the X-ray crystallographic methods of investigation. Debye has elaborated a theory of the effect of electric fields on molecules and has worked out methods for the determination of their dipole moments.