Word: liquidation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Praveen Chaudhari: "All the mental barriers are gone. No one is asking how high it will go anymore." If room-temperature superconductivity is achieved, whether in a year or in a score of years, its impact will be incalculable. The need for refrigerators and insulation, even for liquid / nitrogen, will be gone. And the costs of this still futuristic technology could drop more dramatically than anyone expects. Says IBM's Paul Grant: "We're looking. Everyone is." Adds IBM's William Gallagher: "We shouldn't let our imaginations be constrained by things we now know about. We're just...
...popular press as well as in professional journals -- of new superconducting materials and ever higher temperature ranges. An effect that once could be detected only with sophisticated equipment has become a common sideshow at conferences: a sample of one of the new materials is placed in a dish of liquid nitrogen, and a magnet placed above it. Since superconductors repel magnetic fields, a phenomenon called the Meissner effect, the magnet remains suspended in midair...
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...
...past year and a half physicists have stumbled on an unusual class of ceramic compounds that change everything. They too must be cooled to become superconductors, but only to a temperature of 98 K (-283 degrees F). And that suddenly brings superconductivity into the range of the practical; liquid helium can be replaced as a coolant by liquid nitrogen, which makes the transition from a gas at the easily produced temperature of 77 K (-320 degrees F). Moreover, liquid nitrogen is cheaper by the quart than milk and so long- lasting that scientists carry it around in ordinary thermos bottles...
...much promise that Chu filed a patent application on Jan. 12. That promise was soon fulfilled. At the end of the month, after subjecting their creation to a series of heat and chemical treatments, Wu and his assistants began chilling a bit of the compound, by dousing it with liquid nitrogen, and sending an electric current through it. To their amazement, the sample's resistance began to drop sharply at a towering 93 K. Recalls Wu: "We < were so excited and so nervous that our hands were shaking. At first we were suspicious that it was an error...