I am indeed pleased to prepare this brief foreword for this book, written by several of my friends and colleagues in the Soviet Union. The book was first published in the Russian language in Moscow in 1975. The phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered in 1911 and promised to be important to the production of electromagnets since superconductors would not dissipate Joule heat. Unfortunate- ly the first materials which were discovered to be superconducting reverted to the normal resistive state in magnetic fields of a few tesla. Thus the development that was hoped for by hundredths of a...