Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Professor Heike Kamerlingh Onnes FRSFor HFRSE FCS ( (); 21 September 1853 – 21 February 1926) was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. He exploited the Hampson–Linde cycle to investigate how materials behave when cooled to nearly absolute zero and later to liquefy helium for the first time, in 1908. He was also the discoverer of superconductivity in 1911. Kamerlingh Onnes was born in Groningen, Netherlands. His father, Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, was a brickworks owner. His mother was Anna Gerdina Coers of Arnhem. In 1870, Kamerlingh Onnes attended the University of Groningen. He studied under Robert Bunsen
Frans Michel Penning Derksen in 1921 and they had four children named Lourens, Hendricus, Paul, and Nellie. In 1924, Penning was hired as an experimental physicist at the Dutch section of the Phillips research department located in the Strijp district of Eindhoven. Gilles Holst, former assistant to Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, and head of the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (NatLab), tasked Penning with continuing research on gas discharge phenomena to develop new lamps. Penning investigated breakdown energy potentials of low pressure inert gas discharges. In 1926, Penning observed that electrons under direct voltage current in low-pressure mercury discharges reach high velocities due to high-frequency oscillations