Bardeen, other Nobel Prize winners honored with postage stamps

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is continuing its American Scientists series and has named transistor co-invented John Bardeen as one of its four honorees for 2008.

The physicist, as most of EDN’s readers will recall, focused on electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, surface properties of semiconductors, theory of superconductivity, and diffusion of atoms in solids for a good part of his career. He with Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for "investigations on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect," carried on at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Then in 1972, Bardeen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics again for his theory of superconductivity, this time with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer. To this day, he is still the only person to be awarded two Nobels in physics.

Bardeen died in 1991. His grandson, Charles Bardeen, attended a USPS ceremony at Madison Square Garden’s WaMu Theatre in New York last week to dedicate the 2008 American Scientists commemorative stamps.

Biochemist Gerty Cori, astronomer Edwin Hubble, and structural chemist Linus Pauling are also being honored with stamps this year. Side note on the Cori postage: If you look closely, one of the lines that connects the formula attaches to the wrong element. The USPS has acknowledged the error. (See below)

The 41 cent stamps are available now on request. Unfortunately, the USPS will be raising stamp prices in mid-May to 42 cents, so be warned, you’ll need the extra 1 cent stamp if you plan to use the American Scientists series past May 12.

–Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News