Clinton Joseph Davisson
Davisson, Clinton Joseph (1881-1958), an American physicist, shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in physics with British physicist George Paget Thomson. The two were recognized for their independent discoveries of the diffraction of electrons by crystals.
Davisson was born in Bloomington, Illinois. He attended the University of Chicago on a scholarship but could not afford to continue beyond his first year. In January 1904, physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, his first physics instructor at Chicago, recommended Davisson for a position at Purdue University. In June 1904, Davisson returned to Chicago. When he again left for lack of funds, Millikan recommended him for a position at Princeton University. Davisson worked there until 1910. Studying in the summers, he graduated from the University of Chicago in 1908 and received his Ph.D. degree in 1911. Davisson and Charlotte Sara Richardson married on Aug. 4, 1911. They had four children.
Davisson worked at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh until 1917. During World War I (1914-1918), he joined the engineering department of the Western Electric Company in New York City. There he investigated the reflection of electrons from metal surfaces under electron bombardment in a vacuum. In a 1925 experiment, the accidental explosion of a vacuum tube caused a nickel target to become heavily oxidized. When Davisson removed the oxide from the target, he discovered that the angle of reflection of electrons had changed. Davisson later learned of the hypothesis of the wave nature of electrons proposed by French physicist Louis Victor de Broglie. Using de Broglie's theory, Davisson calculated the wavelength of the diffracted electrons. For his work, he shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in physics with British physicist George Thomson, who had made a similar discovery.
After Davisson retired from Western Electric in 1946, he served for several years as visiting professor of physics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.