John Bardeen

John Bardeen Photo: Deutsches Museum, Munich

John Bardeen was a genuine American, he was born on May 23, 1908, in Madison, Wisconsin. His father chaired the medical faculty at the University of Wisconsin. Already as a 15-year-old, he applied to the university and shortly later acquired two academic degrees.

In 1928, he completed his final examination at the University of Wisconsin, and in 1936, he attained a doctorate at Princeton University in theoretical physics. He taught as an assistant professor for physics at the University of Minnesota. During World War Two, he worked for the US Naval Ordnance Lab. His friends called him "whisperer", he often spoke to himself sunken in deep thought. He was rather introverted and gave a shy impression.

In the autumn of 1945, he moved to Bell Labs, where he shared the workroom with Brattain with whom he played golf on the weekends.

From 1951 on, he concerned himself with superconductors as a professor of physics at the University of Illinois. He was one of the few who received the Nobel Prize twice, in 1956 together with Brattain and Shockley for the development of the transistor, and in 1972 together with Leon Neil Cooper and Robert Schrieffer for the BCS Theory of superconduction.