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Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered zero electrical resistance in liquid-helium cooled mercury in 1911. The figure is taken from Nobel Prize Committee, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Superconductivity allows electrical current to flow with zero resistance

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered zero electrical resistance in liquid-helium cooled mercury in 1911

Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered in 1911 that cooling mercury down to 4.2 kelvin using liquid helium caused its electrical resistance to drop abruptly to zero. Superconducting materials can carry electrical currents indefinitely without thermal energy loss. They are used in high-field MRI magnets, particle accelerators, and experimental maglev trains.

Levitation of a magnet on a superconductor — Julien Bobroff ( user:Jubobroff ), Frederic Bouquet ( user:Fbouquet ), Jeffrey Quilliam, LPS , Orsay, France · CC BY-SA 3.0 · licence · source

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Nobel Prize Committee

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Tags: superconductivity, physics, materials

Superconductivity allows electrical current to flow with zero resistance: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered zero electrical resistance in liquid-helium cooled mercury in 1911. The figure is taken from Nobel Prize Committee, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.