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
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes helium, using several precooling stages and the Hampson–Linde cycle based on the Joule–Thomson effect. This way he lowered the temperature to the boiling point of helium (−269 °C, 4.2 K). By reducing the pressure of the liquid helium he achieved a temperature near 1.5 K. These were the coldest temperatures achieved on earth at the time. The equipment employed is at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. In 1911 Kamerlingh Onnes measured the electrical conductivity of pure metals (mercury, and later tin and lead) at very low temperatures. Some scientists, such as William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), believed that electrons flowing through