John Bardeen

In spite of all his professional achievements, Bardeen was a very simple and unassuming person. He was a good-natured and friendly man who loved playing golf.

He died of heart disease on January 30, 1991 at the age of 82.

He was born on 23 May 1908, in Wisconsin, as the second son of Dr. Charles Russell Bardeen and his wife Althea Harmer Bardeen. He father was the dean of the University of Wisconsin medical school while his mother too was an educated woman who had studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

John’s brilliance was evident from a young age. He was so intelligent for his age that his parents decided to have him skip several grades at school.

His mother became ill with cancer when he was 12. His father did not tell the boys that their mother was dying and John was shocked when she died. His father, in an attempt to provide the boys a normal family life, quickly remarried.

Even though shattered by his mother’s death and father’s remarriage, he somehow faced the situation with courage, focusing on his studies. He graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923 and entered the University of Wisconsin in the fall of the same year.

He earned his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1928 and M.S. the very next year. He had chosen engineering as he felt this field held promise.

He moved to Pittsburgh in 1930 to work for the Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Gulf Oil Corporation. He worked there as a geophysicist till 1933.

He wanted to further his studies and applied to the graduate program in mathematics at Princeton University where he studied both mathematics and physics as a graduate student.

He was still writing his thesis under physicist Eugene Wigner when he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1935.

In 1935, he stared working with the eminent physicists John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals.

He received his Ph.D in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936 and continued working at Harvard till 1938.

He played a pivotal role in the development of the transistor along with Walter Brattain and William Shockley. The transistor became the primary building block of various other electronic devices and led to more research and development in the field of electronic communication.