Clinton Davisson
In 1937, few citizens in Bloomington had realized that one of their own had won one of science’s highest honors: the Nobel Prize in Physics. The winner was Clinton Davisson, a physicist at the University of Chicago. He had developed the idea of Electron Diffraction with fellow physicist Lester Germer. This idea proved that electrons (small, negatively charged particles around an atom that are the basis of electricity) behave both as a particle and as a wave. Regardless of Bloomington’s apparent lack of knowledge surrounding Davisson’s winning of the prize, Davisson’s accomplishment of fully verifying the wave nature of the electron paved the way for the creation of the cell phone and much of the technology we use today.
Davisson was born on October 22nd, 1881, the son of a house painter. As a young boy, Davisson (nicknamed Clint) was very interested in Morse Code, and installed a telegraph wire between his, and his friend’s house. As a teenager attending Bloomington High school, Davisson worked for the Mclean County Telephone Company as a way to earn money for college, while also furthering his interest in how circuits operated. A bright student, Davisson won a scholarship to the University of Chicago where he started to study physics. Davisson’s primary interest was the work of Robert Millikan, a scientist with some questionable beliefs who was famous for proving Einstein’s particle theory of light with the photoelectric effect. Near his sophomore year, however, Davisson began to run out of money, so he moved back to Bloomington. Millikan, however, wanted Davisson to continue his studies, and recommended Davisson to Princeton, where he was soon hired as a lecturer. Funds from the job assisted in his further payment for college. Although having not yet earned his undergraduate degree, Davisson himself began to teach the very same curriculum that he had come to Chicago to learn, graduating from Chicago in 1908 and obtaining a PhD in Physics from Princeton in 1911. That same year, Davisson married Charlotte Richardson, whose brother Owen would also go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics
When World War 1 broke out, Davisson took a job at Western Electric Company, which later became the research facility that is now Bell Labs. There, he met Lester Germer, a former fighter pilot, who had also become quite interested in the recent developments in physics. When Davisson was in high school, a British scientist named JJ Thompson discovered the electron. While Davisson was in college, French scientist Louis de Broglie theorized that such electrons act as both particles and as waves (called wave-particle duality). This was regarded as ridiculous by much of the physics community, with De Broglie almost unable to achieve his PhD until Albert Einstein, who had won the Nobel prize, stepped in.
Davisson and Germer were fascinated with the idea that electrons could behave as both a particle and a wave, and in 1927, the two scientists designed an experiment to see if De Broglie was truely correct. Davisson and Germer used an electron gun that they fired at a nickel crystal structure. The electrons that scattered off of the nickel produced a beam in a diffraction pattern, something that can only be observed in wave-like patterns. This had been furthered by the discovery of X-Rays in 1895.
For his confirmation of Electron Diffraction, Clinton Davisson helped move physics past the classical ideas of Isaac Newton and into a new age, one which describes the universe at the subatomic level. According to Gabriel Spalding, a Physics professor at Illinois Wesleyan, Davisson’s Nobel Prize was one of the two most important nobel prizes in the history of Physics (the other being the Nobel Prize of Arthur Compton, whose description of electromagnetic radiation, that he came up with on a train ride through Bloomington). Furthermore, says Spalding, “The real message of his life story is that, when young people act upon their interests, showing a bit of initiative, then they are going to be supported, in ways that might surprise them.”
Sources
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/davisson-clinton.pdf
https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/history/historicsites/davisson-germer.cfm
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/DavGer2.html
The writer of this article interviewed Illinois Wesleyan University Physics Professor Gabriel Spalding for consultation