Word: germanium
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...horribly slow and unlikely to get much faster given that transistors and other components had to be wired together by hand. Enter Kilby, a newly hired engineer at Texas Instruments, who followed a hunch that you could eliminate some of the wires by sticking transistors onto a sliver of germanium--a close cousin of silicon--and etching circuits onto this crystal "chip," which was about half the size of a paper clip. Many of his peers dismissed such a simple solution as naive, and his microchip "provided much of the entertainment at major technical meetings over the next few years...
...chemical etching method not only to print transistors on silicon wafers but also to lay down tracks between them. Besides eliminating expensive wiring, the new integrated circuits operated much faster. Six months earlier Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had produced a similar chip, but it was made of germanium, required external wires and was tougher to manufacture. Noyce's chip won the ensuing patent race, but the two friendly rivals were content to regard themselves as co-inventors...
...transistor was born just before Christmas 1947 when John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two scientists working for William Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., observed that when electrical signals were applied to contacts on a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. Shockley was not present at that first observation. And though he fathered the discovery in the same way Einstein fathered the atom bomb, by advancing the idea and pointing the way, he felt left out of the momentous occasion...
Until this time, nearly all transistors had utilized germanium because it was easier to prepare in pure form. Silicon offered advantages, at least in theory, mainly because devices made from it could operate at higher temperatures. Also, silicon is a very common chemical element, whereas germanium is relatively rare. Silicon, however, melts at a much higher temperature, making its purification and processing more difficult...
...trick. The Baksan detector consists of four tanks filled with 30 tons of the element gallium, which liquefies at about room temperature. If a solar neutrino of the right energy interacts with the material in the tanks, a feat of atomic alchemy will transmute some of the gallium into germanium, another metallic element...