Periodic Element

Silicon

Tetrels

After oxygen the most abundant element in the crust, at about 28 per cent, and the substance of nearly all rock: sand, quartz, clay, granite and glass are silicon and oxygen in various arrangements. Jons Jacob Berzelius prepared it in reasonably pure form in 1823. Its modern importance rests on one narrow property, the controllable semiconducting behaviour of extremely pure single crystals, which underlies every integrated circuit made since the late 1950s. Glassmaking and pottery are among the oldest crafts there are, but the element in them was identified only in the nineteenth century.

Facts

Identity

Symbol

Si 1

Atomic Number

14 1

Period

Period 3 1

Group

Tetrels 1

Attestation

Note on the Discovery

First isolated in reasonably pure form in 1824 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jacob Berzelius. 2

Origins

Origin of the Name

Named from the Latin silex or silicis, meaning flint. 1

Classification

Element category

Metalloid 3

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Overview

Silicon was first prepared as an element by Jons Jacob Berzelius in 1824, though its ubiquitous oxide, silica, is one of the commonest substances on Earth. The name comes from the Latin silex, silicis, meaning flint, with the -on ending that marks it as kin to carbon and boron rather than the -ium of a typical metal, reflecting its status as a metalloid. Silicon is the second most abundant element in the crust after oxygen, the backbone of rocks, sand and glass. Purified to extraordinary perfection, silicon is the semiconductor from which almost all electronic chips are made, so that this ordinary constituent of stone underpins the entire digital age; its compounds also form glass, cement, and the flexible silicone polymers.

Quartz, silicon's commonest crystalline form, carried its own beliefs long before the element inside it was known: Pliny the Elder recorded the ancient idea that rock crystal was water or ice frozen so hard by extreme cold that it could never thaw, a belief that lent the stone an aura of purity. In the twentieth century quartz acquired a new pseudoscientific life in the New Age crystal healing movement, which claims that quartz and other silica-based stones channel or amplify spiritual energy, a claim with no basis in the element's well understood physical chemistry. Silicon's genuine modern power is electronic rather than mystical: its crystal structure, not any energy it channels, is what makes it the substrate of the semiconductor industry.

Flint and the Modern Name

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.

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