John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain. In the foreground is a view of various transistors.
Gallery of John Bardeen
1950
Murray Hill, New Jersey, United States
Bell Labs scientists who discovered the transistor, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 1950. Pictured are, from left, John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain.
Gallery of John Bardeen
1956
John Bardeen amongst a group at a reception in Stockholm for the nine Nobel Prize winners of 1956.
Gallery of John Bardeen
1956
John Bardeen with his colleagues.
Gallery of John Bardeen
John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs (1948)
Bell Labs scientists who discovered the transistor, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 1950. Pictured are, from left, John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain.
John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He on the theory of solids throughout his physics career, winning two Nobel Prizes: the first in 1956 for the invention of the transistor with Walter Brattain and William Shockley; and the second in 1972 for the development with Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity.
Background
John Bardeen was born on May 23, 1908, in Madison, Wisconsin. He was the second son of Dr. Charles Russell Bardeen, dean of the University of Wisconsin medical school, and Althea Harmer Bardeen, a well-educated young woman who had studied art and design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. John Bardeen had three siblings.
Each of his brothers and sisters had an important role to play in his life. They all affected his thoughts in his childhood and encouraged him to help him on his journey. Along the path, one sibling had even convinced Bardeen to keep quiet about his knowledge until necessary to avoid people using him for benefit.
John Bardeen had a hectic start in his life and people were there to support him in every way.
Education
Bardeen was a brilliant kid right from the beginning - his parents decided to move him from third grade up into junior high.
When Bardeen was 12, his mother became seriously ill with cancer. Thinking he was helping his kids, Dr. Bardeen downplayed the seriousness of her illness. John didn't realize she was dying and was stunned when it happened. His father quickly married his secretary, Ruth Hames, wanting to give his young children the family he thought they needed. It didn't help Bardeen much - he was heartbroken and distracted, barely passing French that year.
Bardeen graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923 and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1928 and 1929 respectively.
He earned his doctorate at Princeton University in 1936, with a mathematical thesis on the work function of metals.
In 1929 and 1930 Bardeen worked as a research assistant in electrical engineering, investigating geophysical and other sorts of problems with professor Leo J. Peters. In 1930 Peters and Bardeen took positions with Gulf Research and Development Corporation in Pittsburgh, where they worked on some early applications of geophysics to petroleum prospecting.
Bardeen resigned from Gulf in 1933 to resume his formal studies. Between 1935 and 1938 he was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he investigated further problems in the physics of metals with Percy Bridgman and J. H. Van Vleck.
From 1938 to 1941 Bardeen was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Minnesota. During this time he made his first efforts at devising a theory of superconductivity. In a superconducting medium, electrical resistance drops to zero below the critical temperature, and currents once begun flow indefinitely. Bardeen's first attempt at a theory of superconductivity was based on the idea of a gap in the energy levels available to electrons.
In 1941 Bardeen left the University of Minnesota for a position with the Naval Ordnance Research Laboratory that lasted the duration of World War II. His concerns during the war were with underwater ordnance and minesweeping.
Bardeen was hired in the fall of 1945 by Bell Telephone Laboratories. Here he became a member of William Shockley's semiconductor research division, playing a major part in the invention of the point-contact transistor. It was Bardeen who determined why Shockley's first design for a semiconductor amplifier would not work; the energy states of a semiconductor favored the formation of a layer of charge on its surface, and this charge screened the interior from the influence of an electric field that was required by Shockley's design. Walter H. Brattain, another member of Shockley's group, investigated the properties of the surface states, and from his experiments grew a practical semiconductor amplifier, the transistor. The transistor was first demonstrated on December 16, 1947, and Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for their discovery.
Bardeen's interest in superconductivity was reawakened in 1950 by the discovery of the isotope effect; it was found that the critical temperature for a superconductor depended on the square root of its atomic mass. Bardeen concluded that the interaction of electrons with ions in a crystal lattice must play an important part in superconductivity, but he was still unable to explain the phenomenon.
Bardeen left Bell Laboratories in the fall of 1951 for a professorship at the University of Illinois. In 1955 he renewed his research on the phenomenon of superconductivity, this time with the aid of his graduate student J. R. Schrieffer and of Leon N. Cooper. Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer discovered that the pairing of the electrons is such that (for a state in which no current flows in the superconductor) an electron with a given momentum and spin will be paired with an electron having the opposite momentum and spin. As well as the vanishing resistance of a super-conductor, the theory of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer justified the equations of Ginzburg and Landau and London's description of the magnetic properties of a superconductor. For their successful model of superconductivity, Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1972. Subsequent refinements of their work have produced ever better agreement of theory and experiment.
After 1975 he served as emeritus professor at the University of Illinois. He died in Boston on January 30, 1991, as the result of heart failure following surgery that had revealed the presence of lung cancer.
Though his life ended, his legacy was everlasting. His contributions to science allowed the world to become what it is today - a magnificent technological field. His leadership was evident in being the only holder of two Nobel Physics Prizes.
John Bardeen was a leader of physics leaving a legacy of the great information age today because of his invention of the transistor and other scientific benefits to society and their long-term effects on society.
Bardeen was the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice in the same discipline. He gave much of his Nobel Prize money to fund the Fritz London Memorial Lectures at Duke University.
On January 10, 1977, John Bardeen was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford. He was represented at the ceremony by his son, William Bardeen. Bardeen was one of 11 recipients given the Third Century Award from President George H. W. Bush in 1990 for "exceptional contributions to American society" and was granted a gold medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988. In 1994, The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society established the John Bardeen Award which recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions and shown leadership in the field of electronic materials.
In honor of Professor Bardeen, the engineering quadrangle at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is named the Bardeen Quad.
Bardeen was honored on March 6, 2008, United States postage stamp as part of the "American Scientists" series designed by artist Victor Stabin.
When Bardeen was asked about his beliefs during a 1988 interview, he responded: "I am not a religious person, and so do not think about it very much." However, he has also said: "I feel that science cannot provide an answer to the ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of life."
His children were taken to church by his wife, who taught Sunday school and was a church elder. Despite this, he and his wife made it clear that they did not have faith in an afterlife and other religious ideas.
Views
Bardeen suggested that electrons in superconducting states would be unable to absorb energy quanta unless the quanta were large enough to carry them over the energy gap into states representing normal conductivity, and they would consequently be trapped in superconducting states. The energy gap would arise from interactions of the electrons in a conductor with static displacements of the crystal lattice, but his theory was unsuccessful.
Quotations:
"Science is a collaborative effort."
"Science is a field which grows continuously with ever-expanding frontiers."
"I knew the transistor was important, but I never foresaw the revolution in electronics it would bring.
Membership
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
1954
Society of Fellows at Harvard University
,
United States
1935 - 1938
Personality
Bardeen was a man with a very unassuming personality. While he served as a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, he was best remembered by neighbors for hosting cookouts where he would cook for his friends, many of whom were unaware of his accomplishments at the university. He would always ask his guests if they liked the hamburger bun toasted (since he liked his that way). He enjoyed playing golf and going on picnics with his family.
Quotes from others about the person
Lillian Hoddeson, a University of Illinois historian who wrote a book on Bardeen, said that because he "differed radically from the popular stereotype of 'genius' and was uninterested in appearing other than ordinary, the public and the media often overlooked him."
"John Bardeen was the most intelligent human being that I've ever met" - Bob Brattain.
Interests
picnics with his family
Sport & Clubs
golf, hiking
Connections
Bardeen's family influenced him greatly in the future for they were the ones to be his future. His children taught him to love all children, for the one in the picture is not his own - he is just teaching gifted children, and his wife helped him persevere through troubles in his life. Bardeen married Jane Maxwell on July 18, 1938. The couple had three children: James Maxwell, William Allan, and Elizabeth.
He was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with fellow scientists John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the point-contact transistor in December 1947.
colleague:
Leon Cooper
He is an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, who with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of superconductivity.
He is an American physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon N Cooper, was a recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity.
Acquaintance:
Eugene Paul Wigner
Only after his assistance, Bardeen became interested in physics very much and this was the start of his work with the transistor.
Acquaintance:
John Van Fleck
It was Professor John Van Fleck that first introduced Bardeen to quantum physics.
