Clinton Joseph Davisson was an American physicist who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction in the famous Davisson-Germer experiment. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson. Wikipedia
“Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.”
[Davisson, Clinton, The Discovery of Electron Waves, Nobel Lectures, Physics 1922-1941, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1937/davisson-lecture.html, Amsterdam, Elsevier Publishing Company (1965), 1937]
