Becomes Head of Cryogenic Laboratory
In 1882, at the age of twenty-nine, Kamerlingh Onnes accepted Holland's first chair in experimental physics at Leiden University. He also became the director of the laboratory there, where he was able to pursue his interest in low-temperature physics, also known as cryogenics. A dedicated experimentalist, Kamerlingh Onnes declared in his inaugural address: "I should like to write 'through measuring is knowing' as a motto above each physics laboratory." He would spend the rest of his career at Leiden. During the next forty-two years, he established it as the undisputed world headquarters of low-temperature research.
When Kamerlingh Onnes began his pioneering work, cryogenic physics was a relatively unknown science. Before him, the liquefaction of gases at very low temperatures was considered an end in itself, but Kamerlingh Onnes was interested in low-temperature physics in order to gather experimental evidence about the atomic nature of matter. When he set out to cool gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, and helium to extremely low temperatures, there were three means at his disposal. A cooling effect due to the rapid evaporation of a liquid had been discovered in 1877 by the Swiss physicist R.
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