A ceramic that should have been an insulator won a Nobel Prize in under two years
For 75 years after superconductivity's 1911 discovery, every known superconductor needed cooling to near absolute zero. In 1986, IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller found a brittle copper-oxide ceramic that turned superconducting at a comparatively balmy 35 kelvin, smashing the old record. Their paper won the Nobel Prize in Physics just nineteen months later, the fastest gap between discovery and Nobel in the prize's history.