Background
Davisson was born on October 22, 1881, in Bloomington, Illinois, the son of Joseph Davisson, a painter and paperhanger, and Mary Calvert, a school-teacher.
10750 Laurel Ave, Bloomington, CA 92316, United States
Davisson did not start school until the age of seven and lost an additional year through illness, graduating from Bloomington High School at the age of twenty. Davisson achieved scholastic distinction despite his limited physical resources and the need to work at night as an operator at the McLean County Telephone Company.
5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
Davisson received a one-year scholarship for proficiency in physics and mathematics to the University of Chicago, which he entered in the fall of 1902. Davisson immediately came under the influence of Robert A. Millikan, who received the Nobel prize in physics in 1923 for his researches on the elementary charge of the electron and the photoelectric effect. Davisson's first course with Millikan was crucial; he was "delighted to find that physics was the concise, orderly science [he] had imagined it to be, and that a physicist could be so openly and earnestly concerned about such matters as colliding bodies. " It was fortunate that this early exposure was so positive, for at the end of his freshman year Davisson had to leave the university for lack of funds. Davisson obtained temporary employment at the telephone company in Bloomington until January 1904, when he obtained, upon Millikan's recommendation, a temporary position as assistant in physics at Purdue University. By June Davisson was able to return to the University of Chicago, where he continued his studies until August 1905. Forced to leave again for lack of money, Davisson was appointed part-time instructor in physics at Princeton, again upon Millikan's recommendation; he held this post until 1910. Davisson returned to Chicago during the summers of 1906, 1907, and 1908, and finally obtained the Bachelor of Science degree in August 1908.
10750 Laurel Ave, Bloomington, CA 92316, United States
Davisson did not start school until the age of seven and lost an additional year through illness, graduating from Bloomington High School at the age of twenty. Davisson achieved scholastic distinction despite his limited physical resources and the need to work at night as an operator at the McLean County Telephone Company.
5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
Davisson received a one-year scholarship for proficiency in physics and mathematics to the University of Chicago, which he entered in the fall of 1902. Davisson immediately came under the influence of Robert A. Millikan, who received the Nobel prize in physics in 1923 for his researches on the elementary charge of the electron and the photoelectric effect. Davisson's first course with Millikan was crucial; he was "delighted to find that physics was the concise, orderly science [he] had imagined it to be, and that a physicist could be so openly and earnestly concerned about such matters as colliding bodies. " It was fortunate that this early exposure was so positive, for at the end of his freshman year Davisson had to leave the university for lack of funds. Davisson obtained temporary employment at the telephone company in Bloomington until January 1904, when he obtained, upon Millikan's recommendation, a temporary position as assistant in physics at Purdue University. By June Davisson was able to return to the University of Chicago, where he continued his studies until August 1905. Forced to leave again for lack of money, Davisson was appointed part-time instructor in physics at Princeton, again upon Millikan's recommendation; he held this post until 1910. Davisson returned to Chicago during the summers of 1906, 1907, and 1908, and finally obtained the Bachelor of Science degree in August 1908.
Nobel Prize
Davisson was born on October 22, 1881, in Bloomington, Illinois, the son of Joseph Davisson, a painter and paperhanger, and Mary Calvert, a school-teacher.
Davisson did not start school until the age of seven and lost an additional year through illness, graduating from Bloomington High School at the age of twenty. Davisson achieved scholastic distinction despite his limited physical resources and the need to work at night as an operator at the McLean County Telephone Company.
Upon graduation, Davisson received a one-year scholarship for proficiency in physics and mathematics to the University of Chicago, which he entered in the fall of 1902. Davisson immediately came under the influence of Robert A. Millikan, who received the Nobel prize in physics in 1923 for his researches on the elementary charge of the electron and the photoelectric effect. Davisson's first course with Millikan was crucial; he was "delighted to find that physics was the concise, orderly science [he] had imagined it to be, and that a physicist could be so openly and earnestly concerned about such matters as colliding bodies. " It was fortunate that this early exposure was so positive, for at the end of his freshman year Davisson had to leave the university for lack of funds. Davisson obtained temporary employment at the telephone company in Bloomington until January 1904, when he obtained, upon Millikan's recommendation, a temporary position as assistant in physics at Purdue University.
By June Davisson was able to return to the University of Chicago, where he continued his studies until August 1905. Forced to leave again for lack of money, Davisson was appointed part-time instructor in physics at Princeton, again upon Millikan's recommendation; he held this post until 1910.
Davisson returned to Chicago during the summers of 1906, 1907, and 1908, and finally obtained the Bachelor of Science degree in August 1908.
While at Princeton, Davisson had come under the influence of Owen W. Richardson. This electron physicist from England received the Nobel prize in physics in 1928 for his work on the thermionic emission of electrons. Davisson later credited his own success to having caught "the physicist's point of view - his habit of mind - his way of looking at things" from Millikan and Richardson rather than to any sequence of courses. His Doctor of Philosophy dissertation at Princeton (1911) was an extension of research initiated by Richardson on the positive ions emitted from alkaline metal salts, a topic of many of his later studies.
In the fall of 1911, Davisson joined the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh as an instructor in physics. His eighteen-hour teaching load left him little time for research, and during his six years there he published only three short theoretical notes. In the summer of 1913, he visited the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, where he worked with J. J. Thomson, who had been awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1906.
After the entry of the United States into World War I, Davisson attempted to enlist in the military service but was refused because of his frail health. He, therefore, took a leave from Carnegie Tech to work in military telecommunications research with the engineering department of the Western Electric Company Laboratories in New York City. His work involved supervising the development and testing of an oxide-coated nickel filament to substitute for the platinum filament then in use.
After the war, Davisson accepted a permanent research position at Western Electric. Relieved of the responsibility of supervising routine filament tests, Davisson turned to a program of basic research in oxide-coated cathodes. Western Electric was interested in these devices because of the need to supply the parent Bell Telephone Company with reliable signal amplifiers. As an offshoot of this work, Davisson and his assistant, Charles H. Kunsman, discovered late in 1920 that electrons directed at a clean nickel target in a vacuum were reflected with virtually no loss in energy, that is, they were elastically scattered. Realizing that these "billiard ball" electrons might serve as a tool for exploring the extranuclear structure of target atoms, Davisson and Kunsman developed an extensive program of scattering electrons from different materials. Despite considerable experimental and mathematical ingenuity, they failed to achieve a correlation between their findings and theoretical predictions. They abandoned the project late in 1923, at which time Kunsman left the company.
A year later, joined by Lester H. Germer, Davisson resumed the electron-scattering project. On February 5, 1925, while the electron tube was being reactivated, an accident occurred that eventually changed the character of the investigation. The experimental tube cracked for some unknown reason, and the inrushing air badly oxidized the hot nickel target. The ensuing repairs involved extensive heating of the target in hydrogen and in a vacuum; when the experiments were resumed, the results obtained were markedly different from those noted by Davisson and Kunsman. The resulting shift in the experimental program, in which the polished nickel target was replaced by a specially prepared single crystal of nickel, took more than a year to prepare. The experimenters hoped that the new experiments would show how the electrons were scattered by the various crystal planes of the target, but again the results were inconclusive.
In the summer of 1926, Davisson took a vacation trip to England. He brought along some of the results of his recent experiments, which he showed to friends and colleagues at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Considerable interest was shown in these results, which the European physicists interpreted as possible evidence for the new wave theory of the electron then being discussed.
On his trip home Davisson studied the new wave mechanics with great excitement. Davisson and Germer then embarked upon the final phase of their work, which was based on the assumption that their scattering experiments might enable them to learn something about the electron rather than about the target. Using the known properties of single crystals rather than of billiard-ball electrons, they experimentally substantiated essentially all the new features of the new wave theory of the electron. In a series of exhaustive experiments and comprehensive papers published from 1927 to 1929, they demonstrated that electrons, like light, have the dual properties of particles and waves. For this work Davisson shared the Nobel prize for physics in 1937 with George P. Thomson, who had come to the same conclusion - in an entirely different way - soon afterward. Davisson did not pursue this new field of electron diffraction much beyond 1930, by which time his interests had shifted to electron optics. With his colleagues at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Western Electric had reorganized their research department under this name in 1925) he made fundamental contributions to electron lenses, electron microscopes, and early versions of a television receiver. After retiring in 1946 he became visiting professor of physics at the University of Virginia.
Clinton J. Davisson retired in 1954 and died on February 1, 1958, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Davisson is remembered as a physicist, who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction in the famous Davisson-Germer experiment. He shared the Nobel Prize with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson.
Quotations: "We think we understand the regular reflection of light and X rays - and we should understand the reflections of electrons as well if electrons were only waves instead of particles . .. It is rather as if one were to see a rabbit climbing a tree, and were to say ‘Well, that is rather a strange thing for a rabbit to be doing, but after all, there is really nothing to get excited about. Cats climb trees - so that if the rabbit were only a cat, we would understand its behavior perfectly. ’ Of course, the explanation might be that what we took to be a rabbit was not a rabbit at all but was actually a cat. Is it possible that we are mistaken all this time in supposing they are particles, and that actually they are waves?"
Shy, modest, and reserved, Davisson was ill at ease with the fame that his accomplishments brought him; yet his friends and family testify to his warmth, sparkle, and wit.
Physical Characteristics: Davisson was frail from childhood, never weighing much more than a hundred pounds throughout his life.
On August 4, 1911, Davisson married Owen Richardson's sister, Charlotte Sara. They had one child, the American physicist Richard Davisson.
