John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin on May 23, 1908. His father, Dr. Charles Russell Bardeen, was Professor of Anatomy and the first Dean of the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His mother, Althea Harmer Bardeen, before marrying, had taught at the Dewey Laboratory School and run an interior decorating business. After her marriage she was an active figure in the art world.
John attended the University High School in Madison for several years but graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he took extra work in mathematics and physics.
Johns' mother became seriously ill with cancer when John was just 12 years old. His father downplayed the seriousness of her illness so that it would not affect his children. John was stunned when his mother "suddenly" died. His father quickly married his secretary, Ruth Hames, wanting to give his young children the family he thought they needed. His high school graduation had been postponed due to taking additional courses at another high school and also, partly, because of his mothers' death.
John entered the University of Wisconsin in the autumn of 1923, aged 15, where he majored in engineering and a worked on to a Masters degree in electrical engineering. He chose engineering because it had lots of the math he loved, but it also had good job prospects. He didn't want to be an academic, like his father. By the time John graduated, 1928, The Depression had struck and jobs were scarce. He was courted, briefly, by Bell Labs, but a hiring freeze closed that avenue of employment. One of the few companies still hiring was the Gulf Oil Company, and Bardeen took a job there as a geophysicist. He worked there for three years, but he always kept an eye on advances in the world of physics.
In 1933 John went to Princeton to get his Ph.D. in mathematical physics. It was there that he first got involved with the studies of metals. He attended Princeton at an exciting time, when new theories of quantum mechanics were being formulated to understand how semiconductors worked. These theories would help John later on. He finished his dissertation in 1935.
John went on to Harvard where he was hired as a Junior Fellow with a salary of $1,500 a year, plus living expenses, a sum that was considered quite substantial at the time. Life in Cambridge allowed him to spend more time with his sweetheart Jane Maxwell, a biologist who taught at a girls high school near Boston. They were married in 1938. After Harvard, John worked at the University of Minnesota until World War II broke out, then he transferred to the Naval Ordnance Labs. During the war he helped the Navy develop ways to protect U.S. ships and submarines from magnetic mines and torpedoes.
John had met William Bradford Shockley when they were both in school in Massachusetts. In 1945 World War II had ended and Shockley was put in charge of a new research group at Bell Labs. Shockley wanted John Bardeen on the team and, since Bell offered John twice the salary he was getting at Minnesota, John didn't have to think long about the offer. John and Jane Bardeen, along with their three young children, moved to New Jersey.
John also knew another member of the group, Walter Houser Brattain, from his grad school days. Over the years their friendship grew, both in the lab and on the golf course where they spent time on the weekends. The two made a great team, with Walter putting together the experiments and John devising theories to explain the results.
The assignment for the group was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass valve (vacuum tube) amplifiers. Their first attempts were based on Shockleys' ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments mysteriously failed every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until John suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these surface states, and they met almost daily to discuss the work. The rapport of the group was excellent, and ideas were freely exchanged. By the late 1946 they had enough results that John submitted a paper on the surface states to Physical Review.After more failed experiments and further studies the pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes. A circuit was used that allowed them to vary the frequency of the input signal easily and it was suggested that they use glycol borate (gu), a viscous chemical that didn't evaporate. Finally they began to get some evidence of power amplification when a voltage was applied to a droplet of gu placed across a P-N junction.
In the spring of 1947 Shockley set John and Brattain a task to explain why an amplifier he had devised didn't work. At the heart of the amplifier was a crystal of silicon. They would switch to germanium after some months. To figure out what was going on, John had to remember some of the quantum mechanics research that he had done on semiconductors while he was completing his Ph.D. at Princeton University. John had also come up with some new theories himself. By observing Brattains' experiments, John realised that everyone had been falsely assuming electrical current traveled through all parts of the germanium in a similar way. The electrons behaved differently at the surface of the metal. If they could control what was happening at the surface, the amplifier should work.
On December 23, 1947, John and Brattain, working without Shockley, succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification. The transistor (a combination of "transfer" and "resistor") was born! The picture on the right shows just what they were working with.
Shockley took the lions' share of the credit in public for the invention of transistor, which led to a deterioration of Johns' relationship with Shockley. Bell Labs management consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated John and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. John began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Neither John nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offered John $10,000 a year and, possibly the one thing he wanted most, the right to research whatever he wanted. John decided to work on superconductivity, which had begun to interest him in his last days at Bell Labs.
On the morning of Thursday, November 1, 1956, John Bardeen was making breakfast and listening to the radio. As he scrambled his eggs, he heard a newscaster announce that the Nobel Prize in physics had been awarded to him, Brattain, and Shockley for the invention of the transistor. Bardeen dropped the frying pan and ran into the bedroom to tell his wife Jane the news.
They received their awards from King Gustav VI and then adjourned for a great banquet in their honor. After dinner, Brattain, Bardeen, their families, and Swedish friends sat around a table at their hotel celebrating. Towards the end of the night, Shockley walked in and was invited to join the party. For one night, the group was together again. The three men remembered the days when they had been friends and a phenomenal research team. King Gustav had asked why john had only bought 1 of his children to such a prestigious award (John had not wanted to disrupt their education) and John quipped in reply that the next time he would bring all his children.
In 1957, along with post-doctoral student Leon Cooper and graduate student Bob Schrieffer, John developed the first theory on how extremely cold metals are able to conduct electricity so efficiently. To this day, this theory is known as the BCS theory (for Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer).
In 1972 John, Leon Cooper and Bob Schrieffer were awarded the Nobel for scs their work. John Bardeen became the only person in history to have received two Nobel Prizes in physics. This time did take all his children to the Nobel ceremony!
John 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 neighbours for hosting cookouts where he would cook for his friends, many of whom were unaware of his accomplishments at the university. He also enjoyed playing golf and going on picnics with his family.
John Bardeen died of heart failure on January 30, 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts. It has been said that Bardeen proves wrong the stereotype of the "crazy scientist."[12] 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."[