An Obsession With a Useless Element Helped Build the Digital World

Bell Telephone Laboratories recruited Teal in 1930, before he finished his dissertation. At Bell, he looked for ways to use what he called a “continuing personal attachment” to germanium in his work, if for no other reason than “to seek some way of capitalizing on this knowledge and interest acquired years before.” His desire wasn’t merely sentimental. Although Bell was less chemistry lab than machine shop—its primary focus was on building better telephones—Teal and his colleagues knew a revolution was coming in which the ability to monkey around with seemingly useless elements would matter as much as engineering. Within a year he was assigned to Bell’s television division, where his chemistry skills helped with preparing light-sensitive substances and glass for cathode-ray tubes. When he heard that Bell’s chief rival, RCA Corp., was using germanium to make its TVs sensitive to light far outside the visible spectrum, he asked to follow up on that. His bosses turned him down.

It would take years, and more than a few detours, before Teal found a way to bring up germanium again. When World War II came, he worked on coatings for gun barrels and rocket nozzles. That was boring, but another assignment, the semiconductor, was tantalizing. With their ability to manipulate the direction, resistance, and amplification of electrical currents, semiconductors would eventually form the basis for all transistor technology. To make one, you need a material that’s neither a good conductor of electricity nor a good insulator. By 1942 another Bell competitor, AT&T Inc., had started using silicon, germanium’s sister element, to make a semiconductor called a rectifier for radar systems. Teal believed he could do better with germanium. He created some germanium rectifiers and would have kept going in that direction had he not been sidelined by pneumonia. When he came back, Bell Labs put him to work on a different radar project involving microwave signals.

Finally, in 1948, Teal heard that germanium was a candidate for the semiconductor material in Bell’s latest attempts at a transistor. Transistors were meant to be an improvement on the often-faulty relays then used to switch and amplify the signals on phone lines; they were to be purely electronic, not electromechanical. A theoretical physicist named William Shockley, one of three scientists credited with constructing the first transistor, was controlling Bell’s research. He was looking at silicon and germanium as elements that might work as semiconductors. Teal wanted in.

Teal wrote several memos to management boasting of his deep understanding of and mastery over germanium. It was less complicated than silicon and easier to use if you used it right—and he made the case, perhaps not so diplomatically, that Shockley was doing it wrong. He was using polycrystalline samples, which Teal thought weren’t efficient. He wanted to fabricate a smooth, beautiful, uniform single crystal of germanium to use for transistors.

Management said no, many times. Shockley argued that his lab’s germanium did the job just fine and Teal’s wouldn’t make a difference. Teal was starting to seem like the office weirdo, but he was undeterred. Finally, in September 1948, he was talking to a colleague on the bus from Manhattan to Bell’s headquarters in Summit, N.J., when the colleague said he needed some germanium fabricated. Teal said he would do it—and make it a single crystal for good measure.

Jack Morton, the Bell vice president in charge of the transistor project, gave Teal permission to buy more equipment and use the metallurgical shop to perfect his germanium, provided he stayed out of Shockley’s way. What followed was a cloak-and-dagger operation that Teal later called “bootleg” research. He spent most of 1949 like so: He would roll his equipment into a lab each night as the staff was punching out and work until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., when he had to disconnect everything and stow it before the day workers came back later in the morning. “This became pretty much a way of life for me,” he later wrote in a journal article.

Teal’s research was brought up from underground when it suddenly seemed useful to Shockley. In the middle of 1949, Shockley’s group developed the junction transistor, which relied on germanium crystals to work best. But his polycrystalline germanium wasn’t doing the trick. Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, Teal was making a product so much purer than anyone else’s that it seemed almost unthinkable. At the end of 1949, Bell dedicated a lab for growing crystals. Teal’s night shifts were behind him.

Bell’s goal was to create a transistor that would switch seamlessly between two different types of semiconductor materials, the p-type and the n-type. Teal was suddenly at the center of everything. He’d found a way to use a technique called doping, in which germanium is infused with some impurities—phosphorus, antimony, or arsenic would work—to substantially increase the power and reach of a semiconductor circuit. (Now also known as “activation,” doping was developed, like most everything else about the semiconductor, by many companies all working on the same goal.) Teal’s innovation was to dope his superpure germanium crystal while the crystal was still growing. In this way, he and Shockley were able to grow the first n-p-n junction transistor on April 20, 1950.

At the end of 1952, Teal left Bell Labs for Texas Instruments Inc., then a new company focusing on transistor technology. When the time finally came to convert from germanium to silicon, which worked better under the high temperatures of military-grade weaponry, Teal’s experience in fabricating the perfect crystal gave him a head start over his competitors. In his book Sparks of Genius, science historian Frederik Nebeker tells the story of the 1954 national conference of the Institute of Radio Engineers. Speaker after speaker at the gathering cautioned, dejectedly, that the silicon transistor was years away. Then Teal took the dais. “Contrary to the opinions expressed in this morning’s session,” he said, the production of the silicon transistor “will begin immediately.” Then he reached into his pocket and said, “I happen to have some here.” The crowd all but gasped. Texas Instruments’ sales climbed from $27 million in 1953 to $233 million in 1960.

From that moment on, the story of technology became the story of silicon (and, in an increasing number of semiconductor applications, gallium nitride). But you never forget your first love. Years after he was proved right for a short while about germanium, Teal had much to say about the precariousness of innovation—who comes up with what, whose ideas build on whose, who gets the credit, and who makes it into the history books. “In the pursuit of new knowledge,” he said in 1960 in an address to the general assembly of the Texas Academy of Science in Fort Worth, “the scientist has learned that certain attitudes are helpful. … He is relentless, dissatisfied with current views, and driven by a fierce curiosity.”
 
This story is from Bloomberg Businessweek’s special issue The Elements.

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