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Clinton Joseph Davisson was born in Bloomington, Illinois on October 22, 1881. He studied at the University of Chicago and Princeton University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1911. Davisson carried out significant work in various areas of physics, and it was while he was working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories that he and his associate, Lester Germer, carried their experiments on the reflection of electrons on metal surfaces, which led to the discovery that electrons behaved as waves in that they could be diffracted. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 with G P Thomson. Davisson died in Charlottesville, Virginia, on February 1, 1958.
Sir George Paget Thomson was born in Cambridge, England, on May 3, 1892. His father was Joseph Thomson, discoverer of the electron and Physics Nobel Prize winner for 1906. He studied Physics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and, after service during World War 1, became Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He continued his father’s work on the properties of electrons, and succeeded in showing that electrons could be diffracted by thin metal foils, thus showing that they behaved as waves. This work led to the use of electron beams in determining the structure of metals and other solids. He shared the Physics Nobel Prize with Clinton Davisson in 1937.
He was appointed Professor of Physics at the Imperial College, London, following which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930 and was knighted in 1943. He died in Cambridge on September 10, 1975.