Clinton Davisson

Born on 22 October 1881 in Bloomington, Illinois, Clinton Davisson was a physicist and Nobel laureate known for his discovery of electron diffraction. After earning his BS from the University of Chicago in 1908 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1911, Davisson became a physics instructor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1917 he took a leave of absence to work at the Western Electric Company on research for the US Army and Navy during World War I. After the war he stayed at Western Electric, which later became Bell Labs. One of the earliest projects he worked on involved thermionic high-vacuum tubes for telecommunications. While studying the reflection of very slow electrons from metal surfaces, he discovered that the electrons were diffracted by large crystals that had formed in the metal. The experiment was the first to show the wave nature of electrons, the discovery of which would earn Davisson a share in the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics. He remained at Bell Labs for three decades, working in a number of areas, including electron optics, magnetron development, and crystal physics research. After he retired in 1946, Davisson accepted a research professorship in physics at the University of Virginia. In addition to the Nobel, Davisson received a number of other awards, including the Comstock Prize by the National Academy of Sciences in 1928, the Elliott Cresson Medal by the Franklin Institute in 1931, the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society of London in 1935, and the Alumni Medal by the University of Chicago in 1941. Davisson died in 1958 at age 76. (Photo credit: Conway Studios, Inc, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Weber Collection)

Date in History: 22 October 1881