Discovery of silicon

Silicon makes up more than a quarter of the Earth's crust, but it is bound in minerals such as quartz and silicates and was hard to isolate. In 1823 the Swedish chemist Jons Jacob Berzelius obtained a brown powder of amorphous silicon by heating potassium with potassium fluorosilicate and washing away the by-products. Humphry Davy had proposed the name silicium in 1808 from the Latin silex, meaning flint, and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thenard had prepared an impure sample in 1811. The French chemist Henri Sainte-Claire Deville produced crystalline silicon in 1854. In the twentieth century, silicon became the main material of semiconductors, and the integrated circuits made from it gave Silicon Valley its name and underpin modern electronics.

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