Clinton Joseph Davisson (October 22, 1881 – February 1, 1958) was an American physicist who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction in the famous Davisson–Germer experiment.

[2] He graduated from Bloomington High School in 1902, and entered the University of Chicago on scholarship.

Upon the recommendation of Robert A. Millikan, in 1905 Davisson was hired by Princeton University as Instructor of Physics.

He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1911; in the same year he married Richardson's sister, Charlotte.

In 1917, he took a leave from the Carnegie Institute to do war-related research with the engineering department of the Western Electric Company (later Bell Telephone Laboratories).

At the end of the war, Davisson accepted a permanent position at Western Electric after receiving assurances of his freedom there to do basic research.

In 1927, while working for Bell Labs, Davisson and Lester Germer performed an experiment showing that electrons were diffracted at the surface of a crystal of nickel.

This celebrated Davisson–Germer experiment confirmed the de Broglie hypothesis that particles of matter have a wave-like nature, which is a central tenet of quantum mechanics.