|Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Non-
Conventional Energy Technology (PACE, 1984)| By RON BOURGOIN
What I should like to do is to review with you the field of
superconductivity. As you know, superconductivity at this time
is a phenomenon that is found to occur at the extremes of low
temperature. For those of you who are comfortable with the
Fahrenheit scale, we are talking about electrical behavior which
occurs at around 400° below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. We're
talking about 0°, or something close to 0° Kelvin, or about
minus 273° Celsius. Kammerlingh Onnes is attributed with the
discovery of superconductivity in 1911. Now there were a few
things that occurred prior to this discovery. In 1908,
Kammerlingh Onnes was the first, as far as I have been able to
determine, to liquefy helium. In 1908! And he was able thereby
to obtain temperatures near 1° Kelvin, which had never been
attained before. Of course, there was considerable theory at the
time of how metals might behave as the ambie