Nobel Prize in Physics Recipient. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes received recognition after being awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics, according to the Nobel Prize committee "for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium." In July of 1908 he used an ingenious apparatus to cool helium to liquid form, which was carefully studied and also became an important aid for the cooling of different substances and charting their properties at low temperatures. Three years later, he discovered that the electrical resistance of mercury completely disappeared at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero, which became known as "superconductivity." For this research, he received the Nobel Prize with 23 nominations from the scientific community in four years to be a candidate for this coveted award. Born the son of the owner of a bricklaying business, he was educated at the University of Groningen entering in 1870, from 1871 to 1879 at Heidelberg in Germany, before returning to Groningen receiving his doctorate in physics in 1879 with the thesis "New Proofs of the Rotation of the Earth." In 1871, when at the age of 18 he was awarded a Gold Medal for a competition sponsored by the Natural Sciences Faculty of the University of Utrecht, followed the next year by a Silver Medal for a similar event at the University of Groningen. He was known as "the gentleman of absolute zero," devoting himself in 1882 to a career in researching lower and lower temperatures and explore the behavior of matter at those extremely low temperatures. In 1878 he became assistant at the Polytechnicum at Delft and began to lecture in 1881 and 1882, the year in which he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics and Meteorology at Leyden University. He reorganized the laboratory at Leyden University and today, the laboratory is named the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory. He joined the faculty at Leiden University in 1882 and started studying low temperature gases. A dedicated experimenter, his motto was "Door meten tot weten" or "Knowledge through measurement." Abandoning the quest of lower and lower temperatures, in the spring of 1911, Kamerlingh Onnes began his studies of electrical conductivity of metals at low temperature. At the early age of 30, Kamerlingh Onnes was appointed a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Amsterdam. He was a Commander in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, the Order of Orange-Nassau of the Netherlands, the Order of St. Olaf of Norway, and the Order of Polonia Restituta of Poland. He held an honorary doctorate of the University of Berlin, and was awarded the Matteucci Medal in 1910, the Rumford Medal in 1912l, the Baumgarten Preis and the Franklin Medal. He was Member of the Society of Friends of Science in Moscow, and of the Academies of Sciences in Copenhagen, Uppsala, Turin, Vienna, Göttingen and Halle; Foreign Associate of the Académie des Sciences of Paris; Foreign Member of the Accademia dei Lincei of Rome and the Royal Society of London; and Honorary Member of the Physical Society of Stockholm, the Société Helvétique des Sciences Naturelles, the Royal Institution of London, the Sociedad Española da Física y Qumica of Madrid, and the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia. During World War I, he reminded his fellow scientists that their funding must go to feed the Dutch children who were starving. In 1887 he married Maria Adriana Wilhelmina Elisabeth Bijleveld, who was a great help to him in these activities and who created a home widely known for its hospitality. The couple had one son, Albert, who became a high-ranking civil servant at The Hague. His health had always been somewhat delicate with his life ending after a short illness. The same year of his death, Willem Hendrik Keesom, a student, who became successor as director of the laboratory, was the first person to solidify helium. His research in low temperatures would be successfully explored starting in the 1950s and producing the BCS-theory, which gave those researchers a 1972 Nobel Prize. His research would eventually lead to the invention of the MRI machine. His brother Menso Kamerlingh Onnes was a well-known portrait artist.