Who was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize?

Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931), a German-born American physicist, who specialized in the interaction between energy and matter, received the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the first American to win the award. The prize recognized two of Michelson's achievements: his design of extremely sensitive optical (light-gathering) instruments, and the accurate measurements of the speed of light he gathered using those instruments.