Superconducting microchip devices that are a thousand times faster than silicon transistors are already being developed. Using such chips, not only will future computers be faster but, by greatly reducing the heat produced, they will also be smaller. Desktop computers will be as powerful as today’s mainframes.

Because of this, many experts feel it will likely be years before superconductors will leave the laboratories and be put to practical use. “The potential of these materials is great, but the timetable that’s been set up by the press is wrong,” says a researcher at the National Bureau of Standards. “It will be five years before we see them in thin films in computers, and up to twenty years before we see them in bulk applications.”

One obstacle lies in the fact that the high-temperature superconductor materials are not malleable or workable as are metals. Nor can these brittle materials be flexed easily, as anyone knows who has ever dropped a ceramic or china dinner plate. Yet, for the superconductors to be used in practical applications, they must be fabricated into wires and films. In computers and integrated electronic circuits, for example, they would have to be made into films only fractions of a micron thick.