John Bardeen

His father was the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, which is part of why the son picked engineering. He did not want to be an academic, and he thought engineering paid better. He finished at University of Wisconsin High School in 1923, at 15, later than he might have, partly from courses taken elsewhere and partly because his mother died. At the university he raised some of his fraternity dues playing billiards. He took a bachelor's in electrical engineering in 1928 and a master's in 1929, then spent three years in Pittsburgh at Gulf Research Laboratories reading magnetic and gravitational surveys. The work stopped holding him. He applied to Princeton in mathematics, wrote a solid-state thesis under Eugene Wigner, and took the doctorate in 1936.

Harvard made him a junior fellow from 1935 to 1938. He taught at Minnesota, then ran the group working on magnetic mines and torpedo countermeasures at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory through the war. In October 1945 he joined the solid-state group at Bell Labs under William Shockley. Every attempt to change a semiconductor's conductivity with an external field failed, in every configuration and material they tried, until Bardeen proposed that surface states were stopping the field from getting in. The group turned to studying the surface. On December 23, 1947, working without Shockley, Bardeen and Walter Brattain got amplification out of a point-contact transistor. In 1957, at Illinois, he and Leon Cooper and his doctoral student John Robert Schrieffer published the microscopic theory of superconductivity. The Nobel committee gave him physics prizes for both, in 1956 and 1972.

Shockley took the public credit for the transistor, and the relationship never recovered. He shut Bardeen and Brattain out of the junction transistor, and neither had much to do with the device after its first year. Bardeen went to Illinois in 1951 for 10,000 dollars a year. Then he did a version of the same thing to someone else. On June 8, 1962, a 22-year-old named Brian Josephson submitted his prediction of a supercurrent across a tunneling barrier, and ten days later Bardeen published a note saying there could be no such flow. They argued it out at a London conference that September, Josephson asking whether he had actually calculated it. Bardeen was wrong. In August 1963 he withdrew the objection in public, brought Josephson to Illinois as a postdoc, and nominated him for the prize he won in 1973.

He died of heart disease in Boston on January 30, 1991, aged 82, having travelled from Champaign-Urbana for a consultation. He and Jane are buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison. Three days later the Chicago Tribune argued that when the century was totted up his name belonged near the top of the list. Sony, which had built its business on his transistors, endowed a three-million-dollar chair at Illinois in 1990, and the engineering quadrangle carries his name. The Postal Service put him on a 41-cent stamp in 2008. His biographer Lillian Hoddeson wrote that because he looked nothing like the popular idea of a genius, and had no wish to, the press kept walking past him.

John Bardeen's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Quantum Theory of the Work Function article
  His Princeton thesis, written under Eugene Wigner 1936
• Point-contact transistor invention
  Amplification achieved with Walter Brattain on December 23, 1947 1947
• Surface states theory of semiconductors discovery
  The idea that unstuck the whole Bell Labs programme 1947
• BCS theory of superconductivity discovery
  With Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer 1957
• Semiconductor Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor speech
  Nobel lecture, December 11, 1956 1956
• Electron-Phonon Interactions and Superconductivity speech
  Nobel lecture, December 11, 1972 1972

• 1923 aged ~15 Leaves high school at 15 and enters the University of Wisconsin The delay was partly courses taken elsewhere and partly his mother's death.
• 1930 aged ~22 Takes a job reading geophysical surveys for Gulf Research in Pittsburgh Three years of magnetic and gravitational work that stopped interesting him.
• 1936 aged ~28 Takes a doctorate in mathematical physics at Princeton
• July 18, 1938 aged 30 Marries Jane Maxwell
• October 1945 aged 37 Joins the solid-state group at Bell Labs Shockley led it. Brattain, Pearson, Gibney and Moore were in it.
• December 23, 1947 aged 39 He and Brattain get amplification from a point-contact transistor Shockley was not there. He took the public credit anyway.
• 1951 aged ~43 Leaves Bell Labs for the University of Illinois at 10,000 dollars a year
• September 1962 aged 54 Argues publicly against Brian Josephson at a London conference He was wrong, said so in August 1963, and later nominated Josephson for the Nobel Prize.
• January 30, 1991 aged 82 Dies in Boston at 82 He had come east from Champaign-Urbana for a medical consultation.

• William Shockley 1910–1989
  Co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs, earning the Nobel Prize and launching the semiconductor age. fell out with
• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. built the integrated circuit on his device
• Jack Kilby 1923–2005
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit, a foundational innovation that made modern electronics possible. independent co-inventor of the chip
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. counted the transistors
• Lee de Forest 1873–1961
  Invented the Audion triode tube that enabled electronic signal amplification and early radio broadcasting. replaced his vacuum tube
• Claude Shannon 1916–2001
  Mathematician and engineer who founded information theory, the basis of all digital communication. Bell Labs contemporary