Word: germanium
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Drilled Transistor. The big trouble with transistors is that they are hard to mass-produce with sufficient accuracy. The tiny specks of germanium that are their essential parts must be made with extreme precision. Even with the best of workmanship, many finished transistors have to be rejected...
Last week Philco Corp. announced that it has licked this production bottleneck by a delicate electrochemical method of "machining" germanium. Two hair-thin streams of a liquid indium salt are squirted at opposite sides of a tiny slab of germanium. The streams carry an electric current, and their electrified liquid slowly dissolves the germanium. When they have almost drilled through the slab, leaving only a few ten-thousandths of an inch, the current is quickly reversed. The drilling stops, and the reversed current deposits metallic indium on both sides of the thin germanium wafer. The result is a transistor with...
...germanium transistor, now five years old, has reached a ripe, mature age as electronic gadgets grow. But, asked the Philco Corp.'s Director of Research Donald G. Fink, "Is it a pimpled adolescent, now awkward, but promising future vigor? Or has it arrived at maturity, full of languor, surrounded by disappointments...
...experts were wrong, says Fink. When the first transistors were built, no one worried about moisture, and moisture has turned out to be a virulent poison. Now the experts are recommending "encapsulation" (a fancy word for careful packaging). Electronic engineers have also discovered that tiny wires break away from germanium crystals for no apparent reason, even when transistors are resting quietly in cotton wool. Worse still, the carefully processed germanium has been known to "turn over in its sleep" and suddenly act up, like a rebellious child...
...knew that certain kinds of coal contain small amounts of it, probably concentrated in some way by the ancient plants that coal is made of. So Dr. Brauchli analyzed the ash of modern plants that grow in parts of the eastern U.S. where the water shows faint traces of germanium. He found that some plants, mostly from swampy areas near mountains, have as much as 5% of the metal in their ash. Apparently they "discard" the germanium, depositing it in outlying parts, such as leaves and bark. Dr. Brauchli believes that it might be profitable, in favored spots, to grow...