of about 40 Kelvins for superconductive materials.
Many scientists quickly saw that the BCS theory was
inadequate to make sense of the new ceramic super-
conductors.
Impact The race to commercialize the epochal
1986 and 1987 discoveries of high-temperature su-
perconductors accelerated through the remaining
years of the 1980’s and beyond. The first company to
take advantage of these discoveries was the firm later
known as ISCO International, which introduced a
sensor for medical equipment. Researchers around
the world wrestled with the formidable problems of
fabricating wires from brittle ceramic substances. If
such wires could be made, energy efficiencies in
various electrical devices would be dramatically im-
proved. Major corporations around the world in-
vested heavily in the research and development of
superconductors because of their potential to ren-
der more efficient computers, magnetically levitated
(maglev) trains, and many other machines. Physi-
cists did make progress in creating materials that
superconducted at 125 Kelvins and 138 Kelvins.
However, because basic questions about the struc-
ture and behavior of these new materials needed to
be answered and because many manufacturing and
marketing problems needed to be solved, it turned
out that the road from discovery through research
and development to successful application was more
tortuous than early enthusiasts had initially envi-
sioned.Further Reading
Hazen, Robert M.The Breakthrough: The Race for the
Superconductor.New York: Summit Books, 1988.
Hazen, who was involved in Wu and Chu’s discov-
ery of the yttrium superconductor, provides a
vivid, behind-the-scenes account of the scientists
and the research of this great breakthrough.
Mayo, Jonathan L.Superconductivity: The Threshold of
a New Technology.Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB
Books, 1988. After introducing readers to the ba-928 Superconductors The Eighties in America
Karl Alexander Müller, left, and Johannes Georg Bednorz won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics for synthesizing a new ceramic substance
capable of superconductivity at 35 degrees Kelvin.(IBM Corporation, AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)