Davisson received his doctorate from Princeton University and spent most of his career at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He began his research there on the emissions of electrons from a metal in the presence of heat and later helped develop the electron microscope.

Then, in 1927, Davisson and Lester H. Germer found that a beam of electrons, when reflected from a metallic crystal, shows diffraction patterns similar to those of X rays and other electromagnetic waves. This discovery verified quantum mechanics' understanding of the dual nature of subatomic particles and proved to be useful in the study of nuclear, atomic, and molecular structure.