JOHN BARDEEN; WON NOBEL PRIZE AS CO-INVENTOR OF THE TRANSISTOR
Author: Associated Press
Date: Thursday, January 31, 1991
Page: 37
Section: OBITUARY
John Bardeen, a two-time Nobel Prize winner who helped develop
transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, died here yesterday
after suffering cardiac arrest. He was 82.
Mr. Bardeen, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and physics at
the University of Illinois, died at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he
underwent exploratory surgery Tuesday that revealed he had lung cancer.
He came through the surgery well and "was laughing and joking with nurses
and orderlies this morning," when he was suddenly stricken, said Catherine
Foster, a spokeswoman for the University of Illinois in Champaign. Mr.
Bardeen's wife, Jane, was with him.
Mr. Bardeen won the Nobel prize in 1956 as co-inventor of the transistor,
and again in 1972 as co-developer of the theory of superconductivity at low
temperatures.
Electronics relied on the bulky and inefficient vacuum tube until Mr.
Bardeen and two colleagues -- Walter Brattain and William Shockley --
developed the transistor in the late 1940s while working at Bell Laboratories.
"It's probably historically as important as the steam engine in the sense
that the steam engine made the industrial age possible and the transistor made
the information age possible," said Larry Smarr, director of the university's
Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Transistors amplify or switch electrical signals. Their importance has
grown as their size decreased. Today they are the core element of everything
from missiles to televisions, telephones to computers.
The scientist credited Japanese mastery of his invention for much of their
worldwide business success.
"That essentially was the beginning of the takeover by the Japanese of the
consumer electronic industry," Mr. Bardeen said in 1989.
After joining the Illinois faculty in 1951, Mr. Bardeen's research
continued to pierce the realm of the unknown, working on the theory of
superconductivity.
Superconductivity, still being developed, would allow electricity to
travel continuously through materials without losing energy from resistance or
heat.
Mr. Bardeen retired in 1975 but remained a professor emeritus.
Life magazine, in September 1990, named Mr. Bardeen one of the 100 most
influential Americans of the 20th century.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete.
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