The Element Everyone Was Standing On

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust, present in ordinary sand and rock everywhere, which makes it an odd choice at first glance for the material every modern computer is built from. What makes silicon useful is not its abundance but a property abundance had nothing to do with: its electrical conductivity can be precisely controlled by introducing trace impurities in a process called doping, turning an otherwise unremarkable element into a switch that can be built, by the billion, onto a single chip. Purified to extreme levels and grown into single crystal ingots, doped silicon became the base material of nearly every transistor and integrated circuit manufactured since the 1960s, common enough and central enough to the industry that it gave an entire region of California its name. The element had been sitting underfoot the whole time; what changed was the discovery that it could be made to behave like a semiconductor on command.