Word: silicones
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...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...
...jokes about them. Jack Dreyfus, head of the $109 million Dreyfus Fund, recently satirized the glamour business: "Take a nice little company that's been making shoe laces for 40 years and sells at a respectable six times earnings ratio. Change the name from Shoelaces, Inc. to Electronics & Silicon Furth-burners. In today's market, the words 'electronics' and 'silicon' are worth 15 times earnings. However, the real play in this stock comes from the word 'furth-burners,' which no one under stands. A word that no one understands entitles...
Therefore, we have six times earnings for the shoelace business and 15 times earnings for electronic and silicon, or a total of 21 times earnings. Multiply this by two for furth-burners, and we now have a score of 42 times earnings for the new company." Concluded Dreyfus dryly: "In today's market, studying securities can be fatal. While you're studying them, they're apt to double, and by the time you find you wouldn't have bought them in the first place they will probably have tripled...