The Bell System Technical Journal 



Vol. XXX October, igsi No. 4 



Copyright, 1951, American Telephone and Telegraph Company 



Dr. C. J. Davisson 



By M. J. KELLY 



DR. DAVISSON, affectionately known to his large circle of friends as 

 "Davy," joined the research section of the Engineering Department 

 of the Western Electric Company in March, 1917 to participate in its 

 World War I programs. He came on leave of absence from Carnegie Insti- 

 tute of Technology with the intention of returning to his academic post at 

 the close of the war, but remained with its engineering organization, later 

 to become Bell Telephone Laboratories, until 1946, when he retired at the 

 age of sixty-five. He then accepted a research professorship in the Depart- 

 ment of Physics at the University of Virginia. 



\\'hen I joined Western's Engineering Department at the beginning of 

 1918, I had the good fortune to be assigned an office with Davisson. This 

 was the beginning of a lifelong intimate friendship and an uninterrupted 

 and close professional association terminated by his retirement. 



Beginning in 1912 the Western Electric Company under the able leader- 

 ship of Dr. H. D. Arnold pioneered in the development of the thermionic 

 high-vacuum tube for communications applications. Although such devices 

 already had important application as voice-frequency amplifiers in long- 

 distance circuits at the time of our entrance into World War I, tubes were 

 really not yet out of the laboratory, and the relatively few that were re- 

 quired for extending and maintaining service were made in the laboratories 

 of the Engineering Department. Research and development programs di- 

 rected to military applications of these new devices brought about a large 

 expansion in the work of the laboratories. Davisson and I were assigned to 

 the development of tubes for military use. 



Important applications resulted from this work, and thermionic high- 

 vacuum tubes had to be produced in what was for that time astronomical 

 quantities. The science, technology, and art essential to such quantity pro- 

 duction did not exist, and had to be created concurrently with a most rapid 



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