Clinton Davisson

Clinton Joseph Davisson was born October 22, 1881, and spent his career as an American experimental physicist working in a field that would soon turn everything classical physics assumed upside down. In 1927, he and his colleagues observed electrons diffracting through crystals - behaving not as particles but as waves, exactly as the new quantum theory predicted. The discovery was profound enough to earn him the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with George Paget Thomson, whose father J.J. Thomson had discovered the electron as a particle four decades earlier. Davisson died February 1, 1958, having handed physics one of its strangest confirmations.