Gilles Holst Philips Fysics Laboratory in Eindhoven ! Or Nat Lab. In 1909 he became an assistant to Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at Leiden University. At Leiden, it is believed that he was the first to witness the phenomenon of superconductivity. The Gilles Holst Award was first awarded in 1939. He died in Holland at the age of 82. Gilles Holst Gilles Holst (20 March 1886 – 11 October 1968) was a Dutch physicist, known worldwide for his invention in 1932 of the low-pressure sodium lamp. His father was a manager of a shipyard. In 1904 he went to ETH Zurich to study
Johannes Kuenen experiments with x-rays with the physiologist Edward Waymouth Reid. In 1907 he was appointed professor of physics at Leiden University. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Kuenen led the Kamerlingh Onnes physics Laboratory. On the basis of his scientific work he was elected in 1911 as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and became a member of the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in 1915. He discovered retrograde condensation and published his findings in 1892 in the Ph.D. thesis with the title "Metingen betreffende het oppervlak van Van der Waals voor mengsels van koolzuur en chloormethyl". (Measurements