Word: silicon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Microwave Associates, a small company on Boston's famed Route 128, does 70% of its $9,000,000 business in microwave components for aerospace computers and radar. Its new Veractor-a silicon device the size of a spring pea-makes possible reception of signals from 10 million miles out in space...
...combination of californium and boron bounced off the nickel foil, were slowed by collision with helium atoms and were picked up by a copper conveyor belt. At intervals, an automatic device moved the copper belt a short distance, bringing the newly created atoms close to a series of silicon radiation detectors. About five times each hour the detectors signaled the capture of an alpha particle charged with 8,600,000 electron volts of energy. Nuclear theory predicts that this is just the particle that would be emitted during the disintegration of element 103. The scientists estimated its half-life...
...have. What's 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...
...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...
...couple of contacts on it," recalls Bell Physicist Walter H. Brattain, "and when he shone a flashlight on it, he got a voltage. I didn't believe it." But Brattain never forgot, and seven years later (a delay enforced by the war), 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...