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John Bardeen was born in Madison, Dane Country, Wisconsin.
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John attended UW Madison and received his BS in electrical engineering
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In 1945 Bardeen started working at Bell Labs with Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson and chemist Robert Gibney.
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The first assignment they were given was to find an alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Their first attempts were based on Shockley's ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor. Their experiments failed every time in all sorts of configurations. Bardeen suggested a theory that used surface states that did not allow the field to penetrate the semiconductor.
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The group then changed their work and it ended up being amazing. By winter of 1946 the group had enough results that Bardeen sent a paper to Physical Review. Which then became the starting period of the Transitor.
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On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Brattain succeeded in creating a point- contact transistor that achieved amplification. A month later, Bells Labs attorneys started working on patent applications.
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Bardeen was presented with the Franklin institutes Stuart Ballantine Medal.
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In 1956, John Bardeen and William Shockley were award a Nobel Prize in Physics for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.
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In 1957, John Bardeen, worked with Leon Cooper and his student John Robert Schrieffer, and proposed the standard theory of superconductivity called BSC. BCS theory explains conventional superconductivity and the ability of certain metals at low temperatures to conduct electricity without electrical resistance.
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In 1959, Bardeen was elected a fellow of the American academy of arts and sciences
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In 1972, John Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon Neil Cooper of Brown University and John Robert Schrieffer of the University of Pennsylvania for BCS theory. Bardeen became the first to win 2 Nobel prizes in the same field.
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Not only was Bardeen a genius but he was also a very nice man. He would give his Novel prize money to foundations instead of keeping all of it to himself.
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John Bardeen was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford
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John Bardeen was one of 11 recipients to be awarded the Third Century Award from President George H. W. Bush in 1990 for "exceptional contributions to American society"
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Bardeen died of Heart Disease at the age of 82.
