Word: germanium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...important is that Ralph Bunche is a great man." Hired by Bell Telephone Laboratories right after he graduated from M.I.T. in 1936, Theoretical Physicist Shockley was one of a team that found a use for what had previously been a scientific parlor stunt: the use of silicon and germanium as a photoelectric device. Along with his partners, Shockley won a Nobel Prize for turning hunks of germanium into the first transistors, the educated little crystals that are fast replacing vacuum tubes in the country's booming electronics industry...
...transistor, the most famous solid-state device, is closely analogous to the familiar tubes in radios. Chief difference is that the electrons that make it work do not move across a pumped-out vacuum. Instead, they move through the tiny clear channels between the lined-up atoms of a germanium or silicon crystal, which provide a sort of readymade vacuum...
...using the same "black stuff"-silicon-in an electrolytic solution, he got the same effect: a current was produced ten times as great as that from any other photoelectric device. A few months later they achieved the "transistor effect," a greatly amplified signal, using only a sliver of germanium and three wires...
...amplifier is made by a new technique called molecular electronics. Westinghouse treats the molecules of germanium or silicon crystals in such a way that different parts of the same tiny block acquire different electrical properties. These "domains" and the "interfaces" between them act like the components of complicated electronic circuits...
Westinghouse thinks it is only at the beginning of molecular electronics. It can grow ribbonlike crystals from pools of molten germanium, and treat them as they grow. An even more advanced technique grows "rnultizoned" crystals with their differences already in them, making them into useful electronic devices at birth...