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
Lowest temperature recorded on Earth 1960, held the record until a temperature of was measured at the Soviet Vostok Station, on the Antarctic Plateau, on July 21, 1983. This remains the record for a directly recorded temperature. In 1904 Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes created a special lab in Leiden with the aim of producing liquid helium. In 1908 he managed to lower the temperature to less than −269 °C (-452.2 F, 4 K), which is less than four degrees above absolute zero. Only in this exceptionally cold state will helium liquefy, the boiling point of helium being at −268.94 °C (-452.092 F). Kamerlingh Onnes