University of Illinois Alumni Association

UI professor John Bardeen won two Nobel prizes – so why don't more people know about him?

The brilliant John Bardeen, a former University of Illinois professor of physics and electrical engineering, claims the distinction of being the first person to have received two Nobel Prizes in the same field. (In total, the U of I claims 23 Nobel Prizes among its faculty and alumni.) Photo courtesy of Bardeen Family Collection

By Lillian Hoddeson

At 7 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 1, 1956, John Bardeen, HON ’74, was awkwardly frying eggs for breakfast. A professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, he had accepted this family duty because Jane, his wife of almost 30 years, was recovering from a bout with typhoid fever. Suddenly, their two younger children, Betsy and Bill, rushed into the kitchen, shouting the news they had just heard on the CBS television show “World News Roundup” – Bardeen had won the Nobel Prize, along with William Shockley and Walter Brattain, for their invention of the transistor. Bardeen dropped the frying pan, scattering its contents.

“I guess I better go shave,” he drawled when the family later heard the announcement repeated at breakfast. “The children were jubilant, John a bit pale with a dreamy, abstracted look,” Jane scribbled to herself later that day. After sending her husband and children to their respective schools, “receiving congratulations was my pleasant chore all day,” she added to her notes.

Wheeler Loomis, HON ’69, head of the UI Department of Physics, asked Jane to keep her husband home that evening. After the Bardeens enjoyed their steak dinner, their front doorbell rang. When John opened the door, he saw a parade of “about 60 physicists and wives marching down the road carrying flashlight ‘torches’ and singing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’” They bore champagne and cups. “It was really thrilling,” Jane noted, “all those people in the dark, coming down the hill, singing and waving their lights.”

Reporters clustered outside Bardeen’s home and office in the days following the announcement, and congratulatory notes and telegrams poured in. The reaction of the feted genius to the unexpected attention revealed much about his modest personality, his decency and his discomfort in the spotlight, signature traits which he displayed throughout his life. Bardeen wasn’t sure the transistor – which he considered a useful gadget but not a great scientific leap – deserved the world’s highest science award. He was also embarrassed to be awarded a Nobel before his esteemed physics professors were similarly honored.

While Bardeen may have had doubts about his greatness, the world did not. Eventually hailed as a father of the information age, Bardeen would see the transistor make possible the world we know today in all its electronic glory – from personal computers to satellites to automatic teller machines. Thanks to Bardeen’s breakthrough, every day billions of transistors are at work in the lives of almost everyone in the industrialized world. “The whole damn structure of civilization depends on Bardeen’s technology,” said Nick Holonyak ’50 ENG, MS ’51 ENG, PHD ’54 ENG, a UI professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics, to whom Bardeen was a mentor. “He’s not just a hero, but a hero beyond our comprehension.”

Brilliant child, brilliant man

How did Bardeen come to this point in his life?

Born in Madison, Wis., on May 23, 1908, he was the second of five siblings in a highly educated family that traced its American roots back to the Plymouth Colony. Bardeen’s father, Charles Russell Bardeen, founded and served as dean of the University of Wisconsin’s medical school. His mother, Althea Harmer, was an art historian and interior decorator who had taught home economics at the University of Chicago’s laboratory high school.

Bardeen showed signs of brilliance even as a child, whiling away the time during the great flu epidemic of 1918 by working math problems with his father and skipping ahead in school so many times that he finished eighth grade before age 9. An unusually quiet child, John relied on his extroverted older brother, William, to help him communicate. Later, John’s wife, Jane, would play a similar role for her husband, as would his physics partner Brattain at Bell Laboratories and Holonyak, his first graduate student at the U of I (acclaimed for his own work in creating the semiconducting light-emitting diode).

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in electrical engineering and working at Gulf Research Laboratory in Pittsburgh, Bardeen found his strong attraction to basic science renewed at a seminar he attended in 1932 on modern physics. In 1933, he entered Princeton University’s graduate program in mathematics. The night before he left for school, he met Jane Maxwell at a friend’s house; their romance would result five years later in a marriage that lasted the rest of his life.

At Princeton, Bardeen worked on developing the new quantum mechanical theory of metals, which he continued during a three-year postdoctoral position at Harvard. It was there that Bardeen first struggled with explaining superconductivity. The mysterious phenomenon, whereby certain metals and alloys suddenly lose all of their electrical resistance below a certain temperature, had frustrated the world’s leading physicists – including Albert Einstein – since 1911, when the phenomenon was discovered. The answer eluded Bardeen throughout his postdoc and subsequent tenure at the University of Minnesota, but it stayed in the back of his mind for almost 20 years while he went on to work in Washington, D.C., Bell Laboratories and eventually the U of I. Enduring such frustration only deepened the intellectual toughness Bardeen needed to become one of the world’s greatest physicists.

‘We discovered something today’

After serving at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C., during World War II, in 1945 Bardeen joined a new semiconductor group headed by Shockley at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

At Bell Labs, Bardeen’s closest friend and physics colleague was Brattain, an experimentalist Bardeen had met when they occasionally played bridge together at Princeton. Now they became partners of a different sort, as they tried to develop a semiconductor device to replace vacuum tubes.

A stamp honoring John Bardeen, two-time Nobelist and former professor at the University of Illinois, was unveiled in March by the U.S. Postal Service in its series recognizing four American scientists. A limited number of commemorative envelopes of the Bardeen stamp may be purchased from the Champaign-Urbana Stamp Club, P.O. Box 6615, Urbana, IL 61826-6615.

Tubes were critical components in the telephone network, acting both as amplifiers and as switches. Replacing them with a cheaper and more reliable technology was of great commercial interest. Besides being bulky, fragile and power-hungry, the tubes were slow to come on, produced a lot of heat and burned out. After working steadily for more than two years, Brattain and Bardeen finally created the transistor, a small, powerful and relatively inexpensive electronic device. When he came home on the evening of Dec. 16, 1947, Bardeen said almost inaudibly to Jane, who was peeling vegetables: “We discovered something today.”

The invention touched off professional difficulties with his director, Shockley, and in frustration, Bardeen turned back to studying superconductivity in 1950. While attending a conference that year, he talked with his longtime friend, UI physics professor Fred Seitz, HON ’72, about his promising research at Bell Labs (which wasn’t getting a lot of attention there) and asked about positions in academia. Seitz brought Bardeen’s query back to campus, where Wheeler Loomis and William Everitt, HON ’69, dean of the College of Engineering, pieced together an offer, despite the tight funding climate. Thus, Bardeen’s frustration at Bell Labs led him to the U of I, where the freedom of research in a university setting gave him the opportunity to develop his physics to the fullest.

Home on the prairie

The grand sweep of the Illinois prairie came as an unexpected thrill to Jane. She had had misgivings about the move from New Jersey, as scientists’ wives had complained about the Midwest’s endless fields upon fields of corn and soybeans and the lack of cultural attractions. But as the family drove into Champaign-Urbana in June 1951, Jane “gasped because it was so glorious.” She loved the sense of space and freedom expressed by the plains, set against the wide skies of the region. John felt immediately comfortable in the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign, which in some ways resembled the Madison of his youth. He experienced the move to Illinois like coming home.

A photo of the Bardeen family, circa 1914, including siblings, parents, a paternal grandfather and young John at far right. Photo courtesy of Bardeen Family Collection

The Bardeens settled into a modest, ranch-style house on Greencroft Drive, then at the western edge of Champaign. An easy drive to the University, the location especially suited John because he could walk to the Champaign Country Club’s 18-hole golf course. There he would balance his strenuous physics work with physical exercise and companionship. As for Jane, she couldn’t wait to sink her hands into the rich, black Illinois soil and plant her garden.

Bardeen felt at home, too, at the U of I, where the physics and electrical engineering departments were abuzz with excitement. In an era when discrimination against minorities was common, Loomis, head of the physics department, had attracted many gifted physicists who had found it difficult to get jobs elsewhere. Bountiful research support and Loomis’ “wonderful parties” boosted morale to a high level. Indeed, the names of well-known campus landmarks reflect the significant productivity of this time period: the Loomis Laboratory of Physics, the Everitt Laboratory of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory and the John Bardeen Quadrangle and Memorial Garden.

At Illinois, Bardeen made rapid progress on the theory of superconductivity and created a semiconductor group in the electrical engineering department. Holonyak recalled the professor visiting their lab nearly every day to speak with the students. Although he never “picked up a pair of pliers,” Holonyak said, Bardeen encouraged students to find out for themselves how to do an experiment. He became known for his willingness to help colleagues as well. Observing the flow of people seeking Bardeen’s advice, a visiting professor likened it to “sharing an office with Buddha.”

Solving the riddle

By the end of 1955, Bardeen’s young collaborators, Leon Cooper, HON ’74, and J. Robert Schrieffer, MS ’54 ENG, PHD ’57 ENG, HON ’74, had constructed a promising preliminary theory for explaining superconductivity, and Bardeen sensed the solution was near. It was then that he learned he had won the 1956 Nobel Prize for the transistor.

The timing of the news wasn’t the best. At the same moment that he was being honored for his breathtakingly world-changing device, Bardeen was standing on the brink of yet another milestone in physics. He was afraid that while he was accepting the Nobel for the transistor, fellow scientists would scoop his team on superconductivity, a problem he had been mulling for two decades.

Despite his anxiety, Bardeen traveled to Sweden for the celebration, where he enjoyed catching up with Brattain, his former colleague and fellow prize winner. Bardeen ended up borrowing one of Brattain’s ties, after an accident ruined his, and then a vest, as his own had turned green in the laundry.

In nearly unbelievable timing, the superconductivity problem suddenly broke weeks after Bardeen’s return. In January 1957, while riding on a subway in New Jersey, Schrieffer wrote down a theoretical expression, which Bardeen instantly recognized as the key. With Cooper, they feverishly computed the relevant experimental quantities. By February, any lingering doubts about having their solution had vanished, but it took until July 1957 to complete and submit their classic paper, published in the journal Physical Review.

Bardeen now worried that the Swedish Academy of Sciences would hold to tradition and not award a person two Nobels in the same field, thus robbing Schrieffer and Cooper of their well-deserved honor. But in 1972, the Nobel Committee broke precedent and honored them with a Nobel for their BCS (Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer) theory of superconductivity, making Bardeen the first person ever to win two such prizes in the same field.

Shortly after returning from his first trip to Sweden, Bardeen achieved another of his lifelong goals – a hole-in-one – which occurred on the golf course near the University of Illinois Willard Airport in Savoy. “He thought that was almost as good as the Nobel,” quipped Schrieffer. Years later, when asked which was the greater accomplishment – a Nobel or a hole-in-one – Bardeen replied, “Well, perhaps two Nobels are worth more than one hole-in-one.”

An extraordinary ordinary man

Bardeen continued to work on cutting-edge physics problems until his death in Boston on Jan. 30, 1991, of a massive heart attack. His physics had changed the world. The BCS theory was a giant step toward the present quantum-mechanical picture of solids and liquids and deepened the scientific understanding of nuclear physics, elementary-particle physics and astrophysics. As for the transistor, we who live and work in the information age of today can hardly imagine living without all the devices that grew from it – cell phones, fax machines, digital cameras and microwave ovens, to name just some. Yet few people other than solid-state physicists have even heard of Bardeen.

Why is he such an unknown?
 
Perhaps it is because Bardeen appeared so ordinary – a man of few words and unflashy pastimes, like family picnics and football games. Certainly not ordinary in his physics nor in his modest and caring responses to others in his life, Bardeen (unlike many of his successful peers) never tried to fit the popular stereotype of a great scientist – a person with superhuman talent, a bit mad perhaps, who needs no training, works alone and receives insights magically, without dedicated work. Instead, this gentle and brilliant theorist fit a less familiar profile – that of a genius grounded in the world.

In contrast to the flamboyant Leonardo da Vinci, the mystical Isaac Newton or the wild-haired, impudent Einstein, everything about Bardeen – his thinning hair, quiet demeanor, thick glasses and neat appearance – murmured modesty. The two-time Nobelist had no interest in projecting himself as anything but that.

UI history professor Hoddeson, who holds the Thomas Siebel Chair in the History of Science at the University of Illinois, is the editor of “No Boundaries: University of Illinois Vignettes” (University of Illinois Press, 2004). This article is adapted from “True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen,” by Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2002).

Editor’s note: May 23, 2008, was the 100th anniversary of John Bardeen’s birth.