[2][3] John K. Hulm received his undergraduate degree in 1943 from the University of Cambridge and then worked on radar development until the end of WWII.
After the war he returned to Cambridge and received his PhD in 1949[1] with a thesis on the thermal conductivity of superconductors.
[citation needed] John and his team scored a major breakthrough in 1961 with the discovery that a niobium-tin alloy maintained its zero resistance under magnetic fields as high as 10 Tesla, far above the saturation point of iron.
When these alloys were properly fabricated into wire, they could sustain currents on the order of 10,000 amperes, thus opening the possibility of producing magnetic fields higher than any achieved before.
For the two years 1974 and 1975 on a leave of absence from Westinghouse, he was the science attaché at the U.S. Embassy in London.