Germer was born on October 10, 1896 in Chicago, Illinois, to Herman Gustav Germer and Marcia Halbert, who were of German descent. Germer's father was a physician; his mother was the daughter of a physician. In 1898 the family moved to Canastota in upstate New York, a busy town on the Erie Canal. Germer's father became a prominent citizen there, serving as an elder in the Presbyterian church, on the board of education, and as mayor.
Education
Germer attended public schools, excelling in algebra, geometry, physics, and German, and won a four-year scholarship to Cornell University, graduating six weeks early due to the entry of the United States into World War I. Germer was awarded the M. A. degree in June 1922, and the Ph. D. in 1927 from Columbia University in New York City.
Career
Upon graduation in 1917 Germer obtained a position at the Western Electric Company in New York City, the engineering and research arm of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Two months later he volunteered for the army as a pilot, serving in France, where he was officially credited with having brought down four German warplanes. Following his discharge of February 5, 1919, Germer was given a medical examination and was treated for shock and nervous strain. On March 1, 1919, Germer returned to his position at Western Electric and was assigned to work with Dr. Clinton J. Davisson, an electron physicist who was doing research on a reliable, distortionless repeater, or amplifier, for use in the long-distance telephone lines of AT&T. While studying the effect of positive ion bombardment on the efficiency of electron emission for oxide coated cathodes, Davisson and Germer noted that electrons directed at metal targets were reflected without loss of energy, a surprising result. While Davisson and a newly appointed colleague, Charles Kunsman, began to pursue studies with the elastically scattered electrons, Germer was assigned to a new project on thermionic emission. He and Davisson published important results on this topic in 1922, and in 1924 Germer published the results of further studies as his Ph. D. dissertation. Germer's hectic schedule (work, graduate school, and raising a family) was interrupted from April 1923 to July 1924, during which time he was treated for a nervous breakdown probably linked to a severe, recurrent sinus infection that was aggravated by noxious gas overseas. Shortly after Germer returned to work in 1924, he was reassigned to the electron scattering studies that had been assigned to Kunsman in 1920 but had been abandoned in late 1923, at which time Kunsman left the company. On February 5, 1925, while the electron tube previously used by Davisson and Kunsman was being reactivated, an accident occurred that eventually changed the character of the investigation. The heated, evacuated tube cracked, the nickel target was damaged, and the experiments were halted. When the tube was repaired and the experiments resumed, a surprisingly different pattern of the scattered electrons was observed. Attempts to explain this new behavior on the basis of the altered crystal structure of the nickel target were inconclusive, and Davisson and Germer expanded their study. Two years later, after further experimentation and after Davisson had obtained new theoretical insights during a trip to England and attendance at the 1926 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Davisson and Germer realized that the new behavior of the scattered electrons could best be understood by attributing wave properties to them. In a series of papers published by Davisson and Germer, both jointly and separately, during the period 1927-1929, they demonstrated conclusively that electrons, like light, have the physical characteristics of waves as well as particles. Davisson and Germer realized that their discovery also had potential for yielding information about the structure of the material from which the electrons were scattered. Germer pursued these studies, using both the scattering method he and Davisson had developed, and also an electron transmission method developed by George P. Thomson in England, publishing over twenty papers in the field. At that time he developed an interest in the behavior of metal contacts under electrical discharge, another subject of interest to AT&T, which he pursued until 1957, publishing nearly twenty papers on this topic. Having completed this long series of studies, Germer's interest in electron diffraction was rekindled when a colleague at Bell Telephone Laboratories asked him to assist in developing a modified form of the electron scattering apparatus he and Davisson had used thirty years earlier. After Germer and his colleagues perfected this method, it proved to be so fruitful for the investigation of surface structures that Germer, even after his retirement from Bell Labs in 1961, continued this work as a research associate at Cornell University. During this time, besides publishing the results of his own research, he traveled to locations all over the world, lecturing and giving advice on the technique and interpretation of low-energy electron diffraction studies (LEED), a technique that has become indispensable to many fields of research. He died after a fall while climbing near Gardiner, New York.
Achievements
Interests
An avid outdoorsman, Germer divided his later years between his research program at Cornell, his busy lecture schedule, and his great love of mountain climbing and hiking.
Connections
On October 2, 1919, Germer married Ruth Woodard of Glens Falls, New York; they had two children.