Forty years ago, two physicists from IBM’s research laboratory in Zürich, Switzerland, reported a groundbreaking discovery: Superconductivity, or the quantum mechanical phenomenon in which certain materials exhibit zero electrical resistance when cooled, could be achieved at higher temperatures using ceramics.

Superconductivity had been discovered decades before, but its applications had been limited due to the extremely low temperatures needed to make it happen. The IBM physicists, Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller, added barium to crystals of lanthanum copper oxide to produce a ceramic material that became the first successful “high-temperature” superconductor in 1986 with a limit of 35 K (more than 10 degrees above the previous record of 23.3 K set in 1973).