Lester Germer

The two men who got there first experimentally though had actually been pursuing something else.

Clinton Davison and Lester Germer worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York studying how a beam of electrons scatters off a piece of nickel.

In April 1925, a bottle of liquid air exploded while the nickel target was hot.

When the glass tube broke, the rush of air coated the target with oxide.

When the nickel was a bunch of tiny crystals, their directions were mixed together, so the scattering blurred into one smooth curve.

That suggested that perhaps a single crystal would show that dependence clearly.

Davidson and Germer set out to study how scattering depended on the direction of a crystal, and they admitted in their paper that what they found was quite different from their expectations.

They had expected strong beams along the directions where the atoms line up most openly.