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
James Dewar him to build at the Royal Institution a large regenerative cooling refrigerating machine. Using this machine in 1898, liquid hydrogen was collected for the first time, solid hydrogen following in 1899. He tried to liquefy the last remaining gas, helium, which condenses into a liquid at −268.9 °C, but owing to a number of factors, including a short supply of helium, Dewar was preceded by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes as the first person to produce liquid helium, in 1908. Onnes would later be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into the properties of matter at low temperatures –