James Edward Zimmerman (February 19, 1923 – August 4, 1999) was born in

Lantry, South Dakota Lantry is an unincorporated community and a census-designated place (CDP) in Dewey County, South Dakota, United States. The population of the CDP was 33 at the 2020 census. According to the Federal Writers' Project, the origin of the name Lan ...

. He was
coinventor
of the radio-frequency

superconducting Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where Electrical resistance and conductance, electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic field, magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material e ...

quantum In physics, a quantum (plural quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a physical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantizati ...

interference device (

SQUID True squid are molluscs with an elongated soft body, large eyes, eight arms, and two tentacles in the superorder Decapodiformes, though many other molluscs within the broader Neocoleoidea are also called squid despite not strictly fitting t ...

) and he is credited with coining the term.

Career

Westinghouse Research Laboratory Westinghouse may refer to: Businesses Current companies *Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the company that manages the Westinghouse brand, with licensees: **Westinghouse Electric Company, providing nuclear power-related services **Westinghou ...

, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania - 1943 – ?? *

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

, 1953 – 1955 *

Ford Motor Company Ford Motor Company (commonly known as Ford) is an American multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. The company sells automobi ...

, Scientific Laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan, 1955 – 1969 * SHE (later BTi, then 4-D Neuroimaging), Founder 1969 – 1970 *

National Bureau of Standards The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

, 1970 – 1985 While at NIST, Zimmerman introduced two important innovations in SQUID magnetometry: * Fractional-turn SQUID, improving the coupling efficiency * SQUID gradiometer, improving sensitivity to nearby fields In addition, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he also gave a major contribution to the development of low-power closed-cycle Stirling refrigerators, to reach temperatures in the range 4K - 8K with the purpose of cooling SQUID devices and small-scale superconducting electronics without resorting to

liquid helium Liquid helium is a physical state of helium at very low temperatures at standard atmospheric pressures. Liquid helium may show superfluidity. At standard pressure, the chemical element helium exists in a liquid form only at the extremely low temp ...

dewar vessels. A major achievement was the use of plastic parts made in the laboratory, which would be assembled in a totally non-magnetic

cryocooler A refrigerator designed to reach cryogenic temperatures (below ) is often called a cryocooler. The term is most often used for smaller systems, typically table-top size, with input powers less than about 20 kW. Some can have input powers as l ...

(refrigerator), in order not to interfere with highly sensitive SQUIDs.. Later, he was also involved in the development of

pulse tube cryocooler The pulse tube refrigerator (PTR) or pulse tube cryocooler is a developing technology that emerged largely in the early 1980s with a series of other innovations in the broader field of thermoacoustics. In contrast with other cryocoolers (e.g. appl ...

Education

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology The South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (South Dakota Mines, SD Mines, or SDSM&T) is a public university in Rapid City, South Dakota. It is governed by the South Dakota Board of Regents and was founded in 1885. South Dakota Mines offers ba ...

, B.S. Electrical Engineering 1943

Carnegie Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, ScD Physics 1951 – 1953

Awards

*NIST Fellow * Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, the highest award for scientific achievement conferred by NIST *In 1987 he became one of the first to make a SQUID using the newly discovered high-temperature superconductors.

Trivia

On New Year's Eve of 1969, he participated in an historic experiment, conducted at MIT in collaboration with David Cohen and Edgar Edelsak recording the first human magnetocardiogram using a SQUID sensor. 20th-century American engineers 1923 births 1999 deaths People from Dewey County, South Dakota {{SouthDakota-stub