Word: silicones
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Bell Telephone Laboratories announced its silicon solar battery (TIME, May 3, 1954), it fired the imaginations of the science fictionists, and the solar system was soon abuzz with solar-powered space ships. Trimming their silicon sails to catch the sunlight, spacemen used the electricity generated by the batteries to push themselves from planet to planet...
More practical imaginations were fired too. Last week National Fabricated Products Inc., a Chicago electronics manufacturer, announced that it has had more than 500 inquiries about the silicon batteries which it has just started making commercially under license from Bell Lab's parent company. Western Electric. Inquiries have come from industrial labora tories all over the world, including India...
HIGH-GRADE MICA, too costly to mine in the U.S., will soon be made synthetically for the electronics industry. Mycalex Corp. of Clifton, N.J. has found an inexpensive way to make mica of magnesium, aluminum, silicon and fluorine, is ready to swing into large-scale production after successfully operating a pilot plant. Eventually, the process may make the U.S. less dependent on foreign supplies of high-grade mica, 95% of which (about 26 million lbs. annually) is imported from India...
...Bell Solar Battery resembles a miniature xylophone. It is made of wafer-thin strips of specially treated silicon, linked in series. Silicon is a semiconductor, i.e., under certain conditions it can be made to carry electricity...
...silicon in the battery is first grown in pure crystals, cut into strips, then impregnated to a depth of only one ten-thousandth of an inch with minor impurities. The top surface is treated with boron, whose atom has one less electron in its outer shell than silicon has; the bottom layer is treated with arsenic, whose atom has one more electron in its outer shell than silicon has. When light strikes near the junction of the two layers, it pushes electrons to the bottom surface, pulls "holes" (electronless gaps) to the top surface, creating a difference in voltage...