Word: silicones
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...electronics industry. But it can hold its own in any competition. Launched in electronics at the close of World War II, the Dallas company by 1954 was a major military producer of germanium transistors as tiny substitutes for standard electronic tubes. Soon after, it produced an even better silicon transistor for military use, then swept into civilian markets with its germanium transistor for the fast-growing pocket-radio and industrial-computer fields. Last week Texins set its sights on still another profitable business: it was the world's first quantity producer of ultra-refined silicon, a key electronics material...
Sand & Science. Refined from common sand, Texins' super silicon is so pure (not more than one part of non-silicon to 1 billion parts of silicon) that the National Bureau of Standards still lacks a grading system for it. In minute amounts, it will enable electronics men to make transistors with nearly twice the heat resistance (up to 300° F.) of previous transistors, and open up vast new possibilities for the guidance systems in supersonic planes and pilotless missiles. Says President John Erik Jonsson: "This is the purest product ever made...
...silicon was just one more example of Texins' rare skill in marrying scientific brains to production brawn. Scientists make up 20% of the company's 4,200 employees. Yet Jonsson, whose rule is "Never hire anybody you don't expect to keep the rest of his working life," makes sure that his people are able to translate their research into production-line products. The research men work out problems in the lab, follow them through the production line until all bugs are ironed out. Periodically, production men, many of whom are engineers, are sent back to research...
...chlorophyll is arranged in flat disks like piles of plates. Biologists suspected that this delicate laminated structure had something to do with photosynthesis, but they could not make sense out of it until Bell Telephone Laboratories invented its solar battery, an electronic device made of thin layers of treated silicon. When sunlight hits the battery, it knocks electrons out of one of the silicon layers. Caught by another silicon layer, the electrons turn into a useful electric current. Hearing about this principle, Dr. Calvin and other scientists speculated that the thin layers of chlorophyll might capture light energy in somewhat...
...battery. The Kidde-Elgin battery sidesteps this difficulty by mixing the promethium 147 with a phosphor (light-giving substance) and enclosing the mixture in transparent plastic. Electrons from the Pm-147 make the phosphor glow, and its light is turned into electricity by a photoelectric surface of silicon on each side of the plastic wafer. No electrons escape from the plastic, and so the silicon is not damaged...