Heike Kamerlingh Onnes when his notebook was deciphered a century later). He reported that ""Mercury has passed into a new state, which on account of its extraordinary electrical properties may be called the superconductive state"". He published more articles about the phenomenon, initially referring to it as ""supraconductivity"" and, only later adopting the term "superconductivity". Kamerlingh Onnes received widespread recognition for his work, including the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics for (in the words of the committee) ""his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, "inter alia", to the production of liquid helium"". Some of the instruments he devised
Absolute zero could not be liquefied. Decades later, in 1873 Dutch theoretical scientist Johannes Diderik van der Waals demonstrated that these gases could be liquefied, but only under conditions of very high pressure and very low temperatures. In 1877, Louis Paul Cailletet in France and Raoul Pictet in Switzerland succeeded in producing the first droplets of liquid air . This was followed in 1883 by the production of liquid oxygen by the Polish professors Zygmunt Wróblewski and Karol Olszewski. Scottish chemist and physicist James Dewar and the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes took on the challenge to liquefy the remaining gases hydrogen