Timeline of Low-temperature Technology - 20th Century

20th Century

• 1905 – Carl von Linde obtains pure oxygen and nitrogen.
• 1906 – Willis Carrier patents the basis for modern air conditioning.
• 1908 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes liquefies helium.
• 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discloses his research on metallic low-temperature phenomenon characterised by no electrical resistance, calling it superconductivity.
• 1915 – Wolfgang Gaede – the Diffusion pump
• 1920 – Edmund Copeland and Harry Edwards use iso-butane in small refrigerators.
• 1922 – Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters invent the 3 fluids absorption chiller, exclusively driven by heat.
• 1924 – Fernand Holweck – the Holweckpump
• 1926 – Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd invent the Einstein refrigerator.
• 1926 – Willem Hendrik Keesom solidifies helium.
• 1926 – General Electric Company introduced the first hermetic compressor refrigerator
• 1929 - David Forbes Keith of Toronto, Ontario, Canada received a patent for the Icy Ball which helped hundreds of thousands of families through the Dirty Thirties.
• 1933 – William Giauque and others – Adiabatic demagnetization refrigeration
• 1937 – Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, John F. Allen, and Don Misener discover superfluidity using helium-4 at 2.2 K
• 1937 – Frans Michel Penning invents a type of cold cathode vacuum gauge known as Penning gauge
• 1944 – Manne Siegbahn, the Siegbahn pump
• 1951 – Heinz London invents the principle of the dilution refrigerator
• 1955 – Roots vacuum pump
• 1955 – Willi Becker turbomolecular pump concept
• 1957 – Lewis D. Hall, Robert L. Jepsen and John C. Helmer ion pump based on Penning discharge
• 1959 – Kleemenko cycle
• 1963 – W. Gifford and R. Longsworth invent the basic-pulse tube cryocooler
• 1972 – David Lee, Robert Coleman Richardson and Douglas Osheroff discover superfluidity in helium-3 at 0.002 K.
• 1973 – Linear compressor
• 1978 – Laser cooling demonstrated in the groups of Wineland and Dehmelt.
• 1983 - Orifice-type pulse tube refrigerator invented by Mikulin, Tarasov, and Shkrebyonock
• 1986 – Karl Alexander Müller and J. Georg Bednorz discover high-temperature superconductivity
• 1995 – Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman create the first Bose–Einstein condensate, using a dilute gas of Rubidium-87 cooled to 170 nK. They won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001 for BEC.
• 2004 – Wolfgang Ketterly and colleagues achieved 450 pK in Bose-Einstein condensate. (MIT)