IEEE Spectrum November, 2014 - 42

The seeds for The sQU Id w er e pl a n Ted w ell
before the work in Dearborn. Back in 1911, the Dutch physi-
cist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first observed superconductiv-
ity when he succeeded in cooling mercury to a few degrees
above absolute zero. At this temperature, atomic vibrations
in the material are reduced to the point where they no longer
produce any resistance to the flow of electrons. So a current
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can be sustained in the super-
cooled material indefi nitely
and without needing a voltage
to push it-that is, it becomes
superconducting.
Research in superconduc-
tivity continued on the mar-
gins of physics until the 1950s. One high point came in 1957
when John Bardeen (a co-inventor of the transistor), Leon
Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer published an atomic expla-
nation of the phenomenon, which became known as the
BCS theory. The three later shared the Nobel Prize in phys-
ics for their work.
Even as Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer were refining
their theoretical explanation, work elsewhere focused on
making useful superconducting devices. Indeed, much like
nanotechnology at the turn of this century, superconductiv-
ity in the 1950s and '60s was considered to be the next big
thing. Superconductors, it was thought, would revolution-
ize computers and computation and transform the power
grid by eliminating resistive losses in transmission and dis-
tribution. Even more fantastic were the proposed uses of
superconductors in space colonization and levitating cars.
In an influential 1968 article, "Economic Aspects of Super-
conductivity," physicists Roland W. Schmitt and W. Adair
Morrison suggested that superconductors might succeed
the bipolar transistor and eventually duplicate the market

Previous Pages: Drawings: u.s. Patent anD traDemark office; Photos, clockwise from toP: nist; forD; arnolD silver/forD

"We had the freedom to do what we were interested in,"
says Arnold Silver, who worked in the Ford lab in its heyday.
"We could follow our noses-and particularly, we could follow
the data." In 1963, Silver was a member of the talented team
of scientists and engineers who noticed a curious phenome-
non in a sample of supercooled phosphorous-doped silicon
and then followed it to its logical conclusion.
Like the discovery of the cosmic microwave background
at Bell Labs in 1964 and the exposition of fractal geometry
at IBM in 1982, the invention of the SQUID at Ford offered no
obvious benefit to the company's principal business. And
yet all of these breakthroughs eventually revolutionized
major categories of science and brought the company enor-
mous prestige. The SQUID story, like those of the other break-
throughs, also speaks to the question of where, in a radically
more restrained corporate research environment, these ser-
endipitous and fundamental discoveries will come from. The
question is all the more important when it concerns a device-
like the SQUID-that takes decades to find widespread use.

ford's sQuId
teaM: The
researchers who
invented the SQUID
were [from left]
John Lambe, James
Zimmerman, Arnold
Silver, Robert Jaklevic,
and James Mercereau.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2014