John Bardeen

American physicist, a researcher of super-conductivity and solid-state physics. Working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Bardeen was a member of the team that developed the transistor. For this work, he shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics with American physicists William Shockley and Walter H. Brattain. In 1972 he shared the Nobel Prize in physics with American physicists Leon N. Cooper and John R. Schrieffer for the development of a theory to explain superconductivity. He was the first scientist to win two Nobel Prizes in the same category.

Bardeen is also responsible for a theory of superconductivity, the property of some metals to lose all electrical resistance at very low temperatures, and for a theory explaining certain properties of semiconductors. Bardeen received many honorary degrees, honors and awards.

Bardeen was the son of Charles Russell Bardeen, the first graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School and founder of the Medical School at the University of Wisconsin. His mother, Althea Harmer, studied oriental art at the Pratt Institute and practiced interior design in Chicago. He was one of five children.

Bardeen obtained his PhD in 1936 in mathematics and physics from Princeton University. A staff member of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, from 1938 to 1941, he served as principal physicist at the U.S. Naval Ordinance Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

In the fall of 1945, he joined the newly formed research group in solid state physics at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was there that he became interested in semiconductors and with W.H. Brattain discovered the transistor effect in late 1947. He left Bell Labs in 1951 to become Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where he was Professor and Emeritus Professor.