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Abstract
At the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), held that year at the Hilton Hotel in New York City, reporters followed physicists around town, trying to get interviews about the new high-temperature superconductors that were supposed to make electricity super-efficient. Paul Michael Grant, then a physicist at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California (later with the Electric Power Research Institute and now the founder and principal of W2AGZ Technologies), was surprised to see a photograph of himself, blown up two stories tall on the side of the downtown Sony office building, performing a "dipper-stick" measurement of the transport properties in a liquid helium dewar of a sample of YBCO-123(YBa2Cu3O7-y ), whose single-phase structure Grant and his group had identified only two weeks before the APS meeting, exhibiting a critical temperature (T c) of 93 K. "Seeing that photo displayed in mid-Manhattan knocked my socks off," said Grant. Shoji Tanaka's group at The University of Tokyo in Japan noticed the paper and quickly reproduced the results, and then the word began spreading. Because LaBaCuO powder was easy to make, others around the world soon jumped into the field.