[2][3][4][5][6] Tinkham was born and raised in Brooklyn Township, a farming community in Green Lake County, Wisconsin.
Later he focused on material properties where sample dimensions are in the nanometer range, including studies of nanowires and carbon nanotubes.
In 1970 Tinkham was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1974 was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize.
[8] In 1956, Tinkham and a fellow postdoc Rolfe Glover found the direct evidence of an energy gap in the continuous distribution of energy levels in the form of a sharp rise in the optical absorption spectrum of a superconductor.
[2] The absorption spectrum observed was a direct consequence of the coherence factors of BCS theory due to John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer; along with other observations, it provided the first substantive experimental confirmation of BCS theory.