Davisson, Clinton Joseph 1881-1958
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Bloomington, Illinois, he was educated at the universities of Chicago and Princeton, where he was instructor in physics before taking up industrial research at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1927, with Lester Germer, Davisson was observing electron scattering from a block of nickel, when their vacuum system accidentally broke down. Upon continuing the experiment the results were completely different, as they found the familiar peaks and troughs of a diffraction pattern. They had observed the diffraction of electrons, confirming Louis de Broglie's theory of the wave nature of particles. This accidental discovery was crucial to the development of the quantum theory of matter. In 1937 he shared the Nobel Prize for physics with George Paget Thomson.