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
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes a conductor would come to a complete halt or, in other words, metal resistivity would become infinitely large at absolute zero. Others, including Kamerlingh Onnes, felt that a conductor's electrical resistance would steadily decrease and drop to nil. Augustus Matthiessen said that when the temperature decreases, the metal conductivity usually improves or in other words, the electrical resistivity usually decreases with a decrease of temperature. On 8 April 1911, Kamerlingh Onnes found that at 4.2 K the resistance in a solid mercury wire immersed in liquid helium suddenly vanished. He immediately realized the significance of the discovery (as became clear