Clinton Joseph Davisson (October 22, 1881 - February 1, 1958), was an American physicist. In 1917 he took a leave from the Carnegie Institute, where he was an assistant professor, to do war-related research with the Engineering Department of the Western Electric Company (later Bell Telephone Laboratories). 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 experiment confirmed the de Broglie hypothesis that particles of matter have a wave-like nature, which is a central tenet of quantum mechanics. For this he was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics which he shared with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson. He remained at Western Electric (and Bell Telephone) until his formal retirement in 1946. He died in 1958 at the age of 76.