In 1914, the Philips brothers hired a young physicist named Gilles Holst to lead the company’s research efforts. Holst had studied under Nobel Prize winner Kamerlingh Onnes and was a key participant in the discovery of superconductivity. In fact, when the experimental material’s resistance dropped to zero, it was Holst who personally recorded the reading—making him, in a sense, the first human to witness superconductivity.