Richard Davisson

Richard Joseph "Dick" Davisson (December 29, 1922 – June 15, 2004) was an American physicist. Davisson was the son of Clinton Davisson, a Nobel laureate, and his wife Charlotte. His maternal uncle, Sir Owen Richardson, was also a Nobel laureate. During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project as part of the Special Engineer Detachment. At Los Alamos, he met Professor Robert Williams (scientist), who later recruited him to teach at the University of Washington. As a graduate student at Cornell after World War II, Davisson built a cosmic ray machine that would do everything but write a grad student's thesis. He acquired a huge magnet from Navy surplus, built a cloud chamber and a set of Geiger counters and designed a universal-focus camera to record cosmic ray events. Then he designed and built an early electronic computer to record and sort the events according to energy, mass, charge, direction and frequency. Davisson received great praise from the Cornell faculty, after he mounted his machine in a trailer that could be towed up in the mountains or lowered into abandoned mines. With such success, Davisson went on to the University of Washington without a PhD. Davisson's passion as a graduate student was to find unusual ways to solve assigned problems. He resorted to the method taught in class only as a last resort.Davisson was a member of the University of Washington's team which designed a system for detecting subatomic particles known as muons. After the U.S. government pulled the funding on the Superconducting Super Collider project, the team was recruited by CERN to help build part of the muon detector of the ATLAS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, in which Davisson took part in, e.g., creating tools to test the detector tubes and as a liaison between the University of Washington's team and the rest of the collaborating group. Davisson retired for six weeks out of every year of his life to the Davisson family cottage in the tin