Superconducting materials up to now and into the future

"Tool maker, stacker of wheat.. Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job upon job." Anybody who has had a magnet quench on him knows what Carl Sandburg meant when he wrote of Chicago. The question before all of us today is: Can we lick the magnetic curses and really apply superconductivity? Certainly the wider the range of properties that superconductors have the more chance there is of success. The first portion of the paper will be concerned with the range of intrinsic properties: the critical temperatures (Tc), critical fields (Hc), and critical currents (Jc) In the latter part we will discuss the fabrication of superconducting materials into composite wires or cables in forms suitable for producing magnets, generators, transmission lines, and some of the other devices that are the subject of this meeting. Structures concerned with nonpower-related applications such as Josephson junction devices unfortunately are beyond the present scope.