Background
Davisson, Clinton Joseph was born on October 22, 1881 in Bloomington, Illinois, United States. Son of Joseph and Mary (Calvert) Davisson.
physicist university professor
Davisson, Clinton Joseph was born on October 22, 1881 in Bloomington, Illinois, United States. Son of Joseph and Mary (Calvert) Davisson.
He graduated from Bloomington High School in 1902, and entered the University of Chicago on scholarship. He completed the requirements for his Bachelor of Surgery degree from Chicago in 1908, mainly by working in the summers. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in physics from Princeton in 1911.
In the same year he married Richardson"s sister, Charlotte.
Davisson shared the Nobel Prize with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson. Early years
Upon the recommendation of Robert A. Millikan, in 1905 Davisson was hired by Princeton University as Instructor of Physics. While teaching at Princeton, he did doctoral thesis research with Owen Richardson.
Davisson was then appointed as an assistant professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
In 1917 he took a leave from the Carnegie Institute to do war-related research with the Engineering Department of the Western Electric Company (later Bell Telephone Laboratories). At the end of the war, Davisson accepted a permanent position at Western Electric after receiving assurances of his freedom there to do basic research.
He had found that his teaching responsibilities at the Carnegie Institute largely precluded him from doing research. Davisson remained at Western Electric (and Bell Telephone) until his formal retirement in 1946.
He then accepted a research professor appointment at the University of Virginia that continued until his second retirement in 1954.
Electron Diffraction and the Davisson-Germer Experiment
Diffraction is a characteristic effect when a wave is incident upon an aperture or a grating, and is closely associated with the meaning of wave motion itself. In the 19th Century, diffraction was well established for light and for ripples on the surfaces of fluids. In 1927, while working for Bell Labs, Davisson and Lester Germer performed an experiment showing that electrons were diffracted at the surface of a crystal of nickel.
This celebrated Davisson-Germer experiment confirmed the de Broglie hypothesis that particles of matter have a wave-like nature, which is a central tenet of quantum mechanics.
In particular, their observation of diffraction allowed the first measurement of a wavelength for electrons. The measured wavelength agreed well with de Broglie"s equation, where is Planck"s constant and is the electron"s momentum.
Davisson passed away on February 1, 1958, at the age of 76.
Member National Research Council. Became honorary life. Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (chairman of the section B 1933), American Physical Society, Optical Society America.
Member National Academy Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Academy Arts and Sciences, Franklin Institute, American Institute, Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Charlotte Sara Richardson August 4, 1911. Children: Clinton Owen Calvert, James Willans, Elizabeth Mary Dixon, Richard Joseph.