Through its parent word flint, silicon reaches back to the oldest human technology: the knapped flint tools and fire-strikers of the Stone Age are worked silica, and quartz, agate, jasper and opal, stones long carried for ornament and charm, are all forms of the same oxide. The element itself has no ancient identity, having been isolated only in the nineteenth century, and its symbolic weight is now overwhelmingly modern, its name lending itself to Silicon Valley and the whole edifice of semiconductor electronics. Berzelius briefly favoured silicium, the metal-style spelling still used in several languages, before the metalloid ending silicon prevailed in English.
Flint's utility outlasted the Stone Age by millennia: struck against steel, it produced the sparks that fired flintlock muskets and pistols from the sixteenth century into the nineteenth, and flint and pyrite nodules served the same fire-starting purpose for hunter-gatherers many thousands of years earlier. The modern coinage Silicon Valley, applied to the district south of San Francisco, is usually credited to the journalist Don Hoefler, who used it in a 1971 trade-newspaper series describing the region's cluster of semiconductor firms, cementing silicon as the namesake of an entire industry and, eventually, of a whole model of technological economy.