John Bardeen
John Bardeen, is the only person to ever win two Nobel Prizes in Physics. The first was for the invention of the transistor, and the second for developing a theory of superconductivity. Bardeen, born in 1908, attended the University of Wisconsin and graduated in 1928 with a B.S. in electrical engineering. In 1948, he invented -- along with Walter Brattain and William Shockley -- the first transistor while at Bell Labs in New Jersey. In the early 1950s, Bardeen took a job at the University of Illinois where he researched superconductivity – a state certain metals attain when extremely cold wherein electricity travels along without any resistance whatsoever. Working with a post-doctoral student named Leon Cooper and a graduate student named Bob Schrieffer, Bardeen developed the first theory on how these cold metals conduct electricity so well. To this day, this theory is known as the BCS theory (Bardeen, Cooper, Schrieffer).
In 1956, Bardeen won the Nobel Prize along with Brattain and Schockley for the transistor, and when asked by the Swedish King why he hadn’t brought his kids, he said “I’ll bring them along next time.” Which he certainly did, in 1972, when he, Cooper and Schrieffer were awarded a Nobel for their superconductivity theory.
