A revolutionary discovery often represents a dramatic transition from a previous state to a radically new one. In the field of superconductivity, not much had changed from 1911, when Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered that mercury completely lost its resistance to electric current when cooled to 4 kelvins. By 1986, despite seventy-five years of research, scientists, using various metals and alloys, had only been able to increase superconductive temperatures to 23 kelvins. The revolutionary discovery of a new class of materials that superconducted at much higher temperatures was due to a confluence of causes. Karl Alexander Muller, after working in the United States, returned to Switzerland convinced that a high-temperature superconductor would have to be an oxide, and he put J. Georg Bednorz to work on such compounds as lanthanum nickel trioxide, a perovskite, but the results were unpromising.

Bednorz and Muller moved on to copper-containing compounds, but these, too, gave disappointing results. A turning point occurred in 1985, when Bednorz read about a ceramic compound prepared by French chemists who were only interested in its catalytic properties. Bednorz, on the other hand, thought that this barium-doped lanthanum cuprate with a perovskite structure was a candidate for superconductivity.

Bednorz prepared a sample of the ceramic compounds of lanthanum, barium, copper, and oxygen in a low-temperature oven (had he used elevated temperatures, the resulting sample would have failed to superconduct). In January, 1986, he subjected this material to an electrical test, finding that its resistivity sharply dropped at temperatures as high as 35 kelvins. Preliminary evidence indicated that Bednorz and Muller had found a new superconductor with an unexpectedly high transition point. In April, 1986, they submitted their results for publication, and their paper appeared in September. Later in 1986, magnetic measurements in their own laboratory (with a new magnetometer) and in Tokyo confirmed their discovery, precipitating an avalanche of discoveries of many new superconductors with higher and higher transition temperatures.

The importance of their work was recognized by a Nobel Prize in Physics and many other awards. They also had the pleasure of witnessing the explosion of interest and many applications of high-temperature superconductivity that their original discovery had started.

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