Bergen Davis

Who was Bergen Davis?

Bergen Davis was an American physicist and a professor at Columbia University.

Davis was born March 31, 1869 near Whitehouse, New Jersey, son of John Davis, a farmer, and Katherine Dilts Davis. He was graduated from Rutgers University in 1896 and was awarded a master's degree by Columbia University in 1900 and a Ph. D in 1901, after which he studied in Europe for two years on a John Tyndall Fellowship under J. J. Thomson and others.

In 1903 Davis took up work at Columbia as Tutor in Physics, becoming an Instructor in 1907, an Adjunct Professor in 1909, an Associate Professor in 1913, and a full Professor in 1919, a post he held until his retirement in 1939, at the age of seventy.

Davis's post-graduate work at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge had prepared him to engage with the new physics which followed the work of scientists such as Einstein, Planck, and Bohr, concepts which he helped to introduce into the Columbia curriculum. Among his many important works was a study of ionization and radiation potentials and the theory behind corona discharges. Much of his later work was in studying X-rays, and he helped improve the double X-ray spectrometer.