| Today, if you ask the typical man on the street, or even a person in a computer science lab, how his Computer or Walkman, or, more recently, his Ipod, is made, he will probably answer, "Someone orders them from Japan or China." In some cases, he may just answer, “Poorly!”
Now, if you dare, ask that person if they could build one chip, or even just one transistor that could be used in manufacturing these electronic marvels. Ask him to do it starting with only the raw materials that come from the earth.
They will, no doubt, turn away, shaking their head and wondering how someone so insane as you could be left running loose in public.
There really is a connection between mother earth and all these products that we take for granted in our everyday life. Who’da thunk it?
It all started just after man discovered that fire could be used and, to some degree, controlled.
Some artistic caveman type is loafing around the cave on his day off, sculpting wet mud into interesting shapes, when his mate, Mrs. Caveman, discovers him in the midst of his muddy procrastination.
Mrs. Caveman is getting hungry and pretty tired of the kids screaming for food. Mrs. Caveman thinks that Mr. Arteeste should be out scrounging for an edible haunch of some primitive animal, or at least scrounging for bushes, leaves or berries.
In a fit of pique (or possibly a primitive bout of PMS) she grabs the mud object that Mr. Caveman has been sculpting and angrily throws it into the fire. This, by the way, is how the phrase, “Throwing pottery,” came into our vocabulary.
Even in those primitive, early days, women quickly learned what the things are that men won't deal with (fire, in this case) and she learned to use those things to her advantage.
Anyway, Mr. Caveman, giving up on his masterful mired musings in the muck, realizes that he will be better off facing saber toothed tigers, wolves, etc. than facing Mrs. Caveman in her current, irritable condition, so off he goes, pretending to hunt for food.
Just like modern man, primitive man would use any excuse to get out of the house.
On a narrow path, a few hundred yards from the cave, he is viciously pounced upon by one of the large, primitive predators of that era. Perhaps it is a wolf or large cat. The force of the attack carries him and his attacker over the edge, where they roll down a steep, boulder-strewn slope that is just short of a cliff.
At this point, you are probably convinced that the primitive man's larger brain will overcome the attacker somehow. Naahh! Our hero is just hanging on to the beast out of fear.
In a complete panic, he attempts to protect his face and throat and other body parts that the attacker seems interested in damaging. About halfway down the hill, fortune smiles on our caveman and the attacker's head strikes a rock with sufficient force to render the attacking animal either unconscious or dead.
When the tangled bodies finally reach the bottom of the ravine and stop rolling, our hero gets up, surprised to be alive. Does he examine or attack the inert enemy? Hell no! He runs for his life! Once he can no longer run, he stops and, only then, realizes that the attacker is not chasing him. With that monkey-like curiosity that man and the apes are famous for, he cautiously returns to the scene.
Once he arrives back at the inert carcass of the attacker, he finally convinces himself that the beast is dead, or at least harmless. He grabs the nearest rock and rushes the carcass, battering it even further. This is not so much to finish off the beast, as it is to vent his anger at being such a coward. We don’t know for sure, but this could have also served the purpose of “tenderizing” the meat prior to consumption.
Having assuaged his ego and restored his self esteem, he drags the carcass back up to the path and back to the cave, where he proudly displays the evidence of his hunting prowess, in hopes it will sooth the savage beast that is Mrs. Caveman.
In order to make room to cook the animal, he finds he must first remove the clay artifact from the fire, where it was previously thrown by Mrs. Caveman. After burning his fingers and once again remembering not to mess with fire, he uses an old leg bone or something to push the clay object out of the fire. It is a big, very hot fire by now.
In his absence, Mrs. Caveman, in her irritated and hungry state, has attempted to burn as much wood as possible, in order to irritate Mr. Caveman. The tremendous heat has glazed the clay, and thus was discovered the art of pottery glazing.
In later years, they discovered that these clay pots, or ones like them, could be used to melt all sorts of stuff. Sand could be melted to make glass, for example. Various ores could be melted in order to separate the useful metal from the useless crud (called slag). This was the beginning of smelting and metallurgy, which enabled man to separate almost any element from the mix we find on the earth’s surface. From these and some chemistry, in some cases, we can manufacture almost anything you can imagine.
The most plentiful solid element on earth is probably silicon, so it was only natural that eventually, man would start smelting and messing with silicon. The caveman was, technically speaking, “messing with silicon,” when he formed that mud artifact that Mrs. Caveman threw into the fire.
After all these thousands of years of messing with silicon, it’s a wonder man didn’t do it sooner, but eventually, in the early to middle 1900’s, the “messing with silicon” was done using a somewhat more scientific approach, which ultimately lead up to the development of semi-conductor grade silicon.
As a kind of side note, the language to describe the process has also evolved. Now, instead of “messing with silicon,” they call it “silicon research and experimentation,” but it is still just messing with silicon. However, the messing is usually done in a fancier cave.
Well anyway, some guys eventually came up with ways to produce all sorts of silicon-based electrical gadgets. Before the integrated circuit was developed, the most important gadget was probably the silicon transistor. The germanium transistor was discovered first, but silicon is more plentiful, and also works better for making transistors. Following the invention of the silicon transistor, there ensued a host of other electronic devices. Almost all of them were made using silicon as the basic building block.
Today, silicon is probably the most commonly used element in the manufacture of most electronic components. These components include, but are not limited to, light emitting diodes (LED's), transistors, photo voltaic cells and, the most prevalent and most important component in today’s electronic world, integrated circuits. Integrated circuits (usually abbreviated, “IC’s”) are often referred to as "chips." Chips are tiny pieces of silicon on which numerous transistors and other devices are formed.
The unlikely name, “chip,” came from the practice of starving the people who were employed to manufacture the integrated circuits. In order to get the employees to perform, the workers were fed only a single potato chip for each integrated circuit that worked after the manufacturing and testing process was completed. The number of working IC's an employee produced determined the number of potato chips the employee got for their effort. Of course, in their starved condition, it wasn't long until the employees started thinking of the individual IC's as "chips."
It also wasn't long until the employees realized that they wanted more pay for their work. This didn’t set well with upper management. Higher operating costs never sit well with management. Many corporations, being what they are, decided to look for people that would still work for "potato chips." Employees that will work for chips are even less expensive than those that are willing to work for peanuts.
The bigwigs at the top finally found such people that will work for those low wages. Unfortunately, these people are all in other countries. That's why so much of electronic manufacturing is now done overseas. However, this practice of shipping jobs overseas does have the side effect of feeding people that would otherwise starve outright. While the job loss in the U.S. has taken its toll, at least the export of potato chips has improved Idaho’s potato sales figures slightly. |
