In 1988, Peter Grünberg, at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, works with a much simpler trilayer structure than Fert's — iron, chromium, and iron — and observes, completely independently, the same fundamental physical effect: a drastic drop in electrical resistance upon applying a magnetic field, though of smaller magnitude than that recorded by Fert (1.5% versus his 50%), with the crucial difference that Grünberg manages to observe it at room temperature, an indispensable condition for any practical technological application. Grünberg immediately grasps the finding's potential for detecting weak magnetic fields and files a patent application on the effect's application almost immediately, even before publishing the scientific result. Both papers — Fert's and Grünberg's — arrive at the Physical Review offices in the summer of 1988, and the two physicists discover each other's work when they happen to speak at the same international conference on magnetic films that year. IBM, recognizing the phenomenon's industrial potential, introduced in 1997 the first GMR-based hard drive read head, marking one of the fastest transitions in history between a fundamental physics discovery and its mass industrial deployment, and also giving rise to the field of spintronics.