Word: kamerlingh
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From the time that Dutch Physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity in 1911 until the recent rash of breakthroughs, there was only one way to produce the phenomenon: by bathing the appropriate metals -- and later, certain metallic alloys -- in liquid helium. This exotic substance is produced by lowering the temperature of rare and costly helium gas to 4.2 K (-452 degrees F), at which point it liquefies. But the process is expensive and requires considerable energy. Furthermore, unless the liquid helium is tightly sealed in a heavily insulated container, it quickly warms and vaporizes away. Thus the practical...
...coming to the field of superconductivity. "Until recently," says John Ketterson, a physicist at Northwestern University, "people were glum. There hadn't been a breakthrough in a long time. Funding was drying up. This has sent everyone back into the field with a new burst of enthusiasm." Although Kamerlingh Onnes envisioned early on that his discovery might pave the way for extremely powerful, compact electromagnets, he and other experimenters were stymied by a strange phenomenon: as soon as enough current was flowing through the then known superconductors (lead, tin and mercury, among others) to generate significant magnetic fields, the metals...
...intensely strong magnetic fields. And it was not until the '60s and '70s that the manufacture of large superconducting magnets became standardized. But progress toward the other goal of superconductivity researchers, pushing the phenomenon into a practical temperature range, was even slower. By 1973, some 62 years after Kamerlingh Onnes had found superconductivity in mercury at 4.2 K, scientists had upped the temperature to only 23 K, using an alloy of niobium and germanium. After 1973: no improvement...
...solid helium. But the quantity was only one cubic centimeter, i. e., one-sixteenth cubic inch or one-fourth of a teaspoonful. That quantity lasted for only a moment, changing into liquid helium, a colorless, mobile liquid, which Professor Keesom's predecessor at the Leyden cryogenic laboratory, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926), had obtained...
...liquefying helium, Professor Kamerlingh Onnes received the 1913 Nobel Prize for physics...