McLean County has one Nobel prize winner — but oh what a one!
Modern electronics rests upon Clinton Davisson’s physics experiments bombarding a block of crystalized nickel with electrons. Davisson and his colleague at Bell labs, L.H. Germer, measured the angle at which the electrons were scattered by the nickel.
“What appeared, and what still appears to many of us as a contradiction in terms, had been proved true beyond the least possible doubt — light was at once a flight of particles and a propagation of waves; for light persisted, unreasonably, to exhibit the phenomenon of interference,” said Davisson in his 1937 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
A British researcher with whom Davisson shared the Nobel was running similar experiments about the same time. During his address in Stockholm, Davisson found the coincidence unremarkable.
“Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before; the stage is set, the time is ripe, and the event occurs — more often than not at widely separated placed at almost the same moment,” said Davisson.
The research, conducted over eight years, confirmed a central tenet of quantum mechanics.
Clinton Davisson was born in Bloomington in 1881. He went to Bloomington High School at a time when few children did— usually kids were from wealthier families, which Davisson was not.
“His father, Joseph, is a house and sign painter and what was known as a paper hanger. His family home was on the 400 block of East Market Street, just a little north and east of downtown Bloomington, and the home is still there. And it's nice to know that this experimental physicist renowned internationally had a role in the senior high school play in 1902 and he played the role of Captain Dandelion in the play 'Down by the Sea'” said Bill Kemp, librarian at the McLean County Museum of History.
Davisson’s mother remembered that as an elementary school child, her son used the upper part of the ice box and the family home to store his wet batteries for experiments. He also constructed two telegraph instrument panels and strung wire across the street to another boy's home so they could communicate via Morse code.
While in high school, he worked nights as an operator for the McLean County Telephone Company.
“He's working the night of the great Bloomington fire, June 19, 1900,” said Kemp. “So, he's a witness to the great Bloomington fire.”
As an adult, Davisson played chess, bridge, and piano, and loved the outdoors, said Kemp.
In 1946, he retired from his research position at Bell Labs after 29 years, and took a post as a research professor in Charlottesville, Virginia. He passed away in 1958 at the age of 76.
“One of the more interesting stories or legacies of Clinton Davisson ... is that he has an impact crater on the far side of the moon named for him," said Kemp. 'We all know, if you grow up or spend time in Bloomington-Normal, that this is, in many ways, the center of the globe, if you will. The influence of this community stretches far and wide, but little did we know, it stretches even to the moon.”
McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.
