Bloomberg Businessweek USA - 02.09.2019

I

n his later years, when he looked back on

his career as a pioneer of transistor technol-

ogy, 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 ele-

ment was—and still is—an exotic and beautiful

material,” he remembered decades later in an

oral history for the Institute of Electrical and

Electronics Engineers. That germanium lacked

any practical application at the time only made

it more alluring. “Its complete uselessness,” he

said, “fascinated and challenged me.”

Bell Telephone Laboratories recruited Teal in

1930, before he finished his dissertation. At Bell,

he looked for ways to use what he called a “con-

tinuing 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 pri-

mary 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 mat-

ter as much as engineering. Within a year

he was assigned to Bell’s television division,

where his chemistry

skills helped with pre-

paring 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 out-

side 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 ger-

manium again. When World War II came, he worked on coat-

ings 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 con-

ductor of electricity nor a good insulator. By 1942 another

Bell competitor, AT&T Inc., had started using silicon, ger-

manium’s sister element, to make a semiconductor called

a rectifier for radar systems. Teal believed he could do bet-

ter with germanium. He created some germanium rectifi-

ers and would have kept going in that direction had he not

been sidelined by pneumonia. When he came back, Bell

40

◼ Gallium $350 / kg High-quality refined

◼ Germanium $1,300 / kg Germanium metal

◼ Arsenic $1.40 / kg Arsenic metal, China market

TEAL: COURTESY AT&T ARCHIVES AND HISTORY CENTER. TRANSISTOR: COURTESY NOKIA BELL LABS. BRAZIL NUT: ZOONER GMBH/ALAMY

33

As

Arsenic

32

Ge

Germanium

31

Ga

Gallium

The Original Germaniac

By Robert Kolker How one man’s obsession with an obscure metalloid helped build the digital world

Teal at Bell Labs in 1951

The first junction

transistor