Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (21 September 1853 – 21 February 1926) was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. He pioneered refrigeration techniques and used these to explore how materials behave when cooled to nearly absolute zero. He was the first to liquify helium. His production of extreme cryogenic temperatures led to his discovery of superconductivity in 1911: for certain materials, electrical resistance abruptly vanishes at very low temperatures.