About Clinton Davisson
Clinton Joseph Davisson (October 22, 1881 – February 1, 1958) was an American experimental physicist who shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics with George Paget Thomson "for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals." == Biography == Clinton Joseph Davisson was born on October 22, 1881, in Bloomington, Illinois, the son of Joseph Davisson, an artisan from Ohio, and Mary Calvert, a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania. Davisson graduated from Bloomington High School in 1902, and entered the University of Chicago on scholarship. Upon the recommendation of Robert Millikan, he was hired by Princeton University in 1905 as an instructor in physics. He completed the requirements for his B.S. from Chicago in 1908, mainly by working in the summers. While teaching at Princeton, he did doctoral research under Owen Richardson, receiving his Ph.D. in 1911 with a thesis titled On The Thermal Emission of Positive Ions From Alkaline Earth Salts. After graduating, Davisson became an instructor in the Department of Physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, he took up war-related research in the Engineering Department of the Western Electric Company. Davisson continued to work at Western Electric until 1925, when he joined the Technical Staff of the newly-founded Bell Telephone Laboratories. He retired from Bell Labs in 1946. The following year, he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Virginia.
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