Silicon

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.

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

The Swedish chemist Jons Jacob Berzelius first isolated pure silicon in 1824, more than a century before the element would become the physical foundation of the computer industry. Berzelius could not have known what silicon would become; in his own time, isolating a new element in pure form was the achievement itself, part of a broader project of chemistry sorting out what the material world was actually made of. Silicon's real significance was invisible to nineteenth century chemistry and had to wait for twentieth century physics: only once researchers understood that a doped crystal of the element could act as a controllable semiconductor did Berzelius's purified sample become the ancestor of every silicon wafer since. It is a common enough pattern in the history of materials, an element or compound identified and purified for reasons that have nothing to do with the use eventually found for it, and silicon is one of the starkest examples, since almost nothing about isolating a pure sample in 1824 suggested it would end up inside every computer built two centuries later.