John Bardeen — The Greatest Engineer You’ve Never Heard Of
“It’s a rare person whose work changes the life of every American; John’s did”. This quote, from the chancellor of the University of Illinois, shows how important John Bardeen’s career was. So why is it almost no one has ever heard of him?
John Bardeen, born in Madison Wisconsin in 1908, was the first son of the first dean of the University of Wisconsin’s medical school. He ended his life as the only person in history to win two Nobel prizes in Physics. And he did that while maintaining a quiet life as a researcher and professor, showing the world that you don’t necessarily have to be flashy to be a genius.
Bardeen studied to be an electrical engineer at the University of Wisconsin, and worked in some odd jobs before moving to Princeton to complete a PhD in mathematical physics in 1936. He then spent several years at Harvard before contributing to the war effort by working on mines and torpedoes at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. But it’s what he did next that cemented his place in engineering history.
In the fall of 1945, Bardeen joined Bell Labs, the research lab in New Jersey that was famous for developing the original transistor. And that is exactly what he did there. John Bardeen, along with Walter Brattain, invented the point-contact transistor in 1947. Transistors serve as the basis for…