Nobel Prize Winners (1640)

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1956 to John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley, talented American scientists, for investigations on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect, carried on at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1908. He attended the University High School in Madison for several years, and graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he took extra work in mathematics and physics. Dr. Bardeen worked on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys physics at Princeton University. Here Dr. Bardeen became interested in solid state physics. He was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He spent the next three years there working on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals. John Bardeen was awarded the Ph. D. degree at Princeton in 1936.

During the war years Dr. Bardeen worked on the influence fields of ships for application to underwater ordnance and mine-sweeping. After the war, he joined the solid-state research group at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Dr. Bardeen's main fields of research since 1945 have been electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, surface properties of semiconductors, theory of superconductivity, and diffusion of atoms in solids. In 1956 the Nobel Prize was awarded to Dr. Bardeen and his two colleagues for their talented work in the sphere of semiconductivity.

In 1957, Bardeen and two colleagues, L. N. Cooper and J. R. Schrieffer, proposed the first successful explanation of superconductivity, which has been a puzzle since its discovery in 1908. Much of his research effort since that time has been devoted to further extensions and applications of the theory. Dr. Bardeen died in 1991.

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