John Bardeen

Hello! My name is John Bardeen. I was born a long time ago, on May 23rd, 1908, in a city called Madison, Wisconsin. Even when I was a little boy, I was very curious. I loved figuring out puzzles and learning how things worked. Math and science were my favorite subjects because they were like giant puzzles just waiting to be solved.

When I grew up, I became a special kind of scientist called a physicist. In 1947, I started working at a famous place called Bell Labs with my friends Walter Brattain and William Shockley. We put our heads together and worked very hard to create something amazing. We invented the transistor! It was a tiny, tiny switch that could control electricity. Before the transistor, things like radios were very big. Our invention was a huge deal because it helped make radios, and later computers, much, much smaller. For this important work, my friends and I won a very special award in 1956 called the Nobel Prize!

But I wasn't done being curious! After my work at Bell Labs, I started teaching at a university and kept trying to solve new puzzles. I wanted to understand something tricky: how electricity could move through certain materials super-fast, like a car on a highway with no traffic jams at all. In 1957, I worked with my new friends Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer, and together we figured it out! Our big idea was called the theory of superconductivity. It was so important that I won a second Nobel Prize for it in 1972! I am the only person who has ever won two Nobel Prizes just for physics. It felt wonderful to solve another great puzzle.

I lived a long and happy life full of questions and discoveries. I lived to be 82 years old. Even though I am not here anymore, my work is all around you today. That tiny transistor I helped invent is inside almost every electronic gadget you use, from your family's phone to your video games. My work helped start what people now call the 'electronic age.' It just goes to show you that everything, even the biggest changes in the world, can start with a little bit of curiosity.