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An Obsession With a Useless Element Helped Build the Digital World
Gordon Teal’s dedication to germanium led to the first commercial transistors.
10 Sep 2019, 06:16 PM IST
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In his later years, when he looked back on his career as a pioneer of transistor technology, Gordon Teal would realize it all happened because of germanium. He first encountered the element as a chemistry doctoral candidate at Brown University in the 1920s, and he liked the look of it before he had any inkling of what it could do. “To me, this bright silver-colored element was—and still is—an exotic and be...
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