1823

Silicon

• Antoine Lavoisier predicted in 1787
• that silica was an oxide of a new element.
• Humphry Davy agreed with Lavoisier in 1808
• but was not able to isolate it.
• Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and
• Louis Jacques Thénard might have obtained
• an impure amorphous silicon in 1811.
• Davy thought it was a metal
• so he suggesting naming it silicium.
• Thomas Thomson thought it was a non-metal
• like carbon, so he suggested silicon.
• In 1823, Jöns Jacob Berzelius
• started with the process
• that Gay-Lussac and Thénard used
• but purified the resulting brown powder
• by repeated washing to obtain pure silicon.

Atomic number 14

• Silica, silicon dioxide,
• makes quartz
• and substrates for computer chips.
• Silicate minerals
• make sand
• and 90 percent of the earth’s crust.

Not a metal

• Silicone oven gloves
• impervious to hot casseroles
• don’t seem like metal
• Silicone caulking
• gooey but resilient when dried
• don’t seem like metal
• Silicon dioxide sand
• squishy under bare feet
• don’t seem like metal
• Silicon computer chips
• semiconducting quick transitions
• don’t seem like metal

Metalloid

• Neither fish nor fowl
• both here and there
• on the fence
• and out of the closet,
• I might be talking about you
• you and your friends
• praising your ambiguity
• how you challenge everyone
• to observe and to think.