Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta

1h ago

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Your phone exists because a tired guy dipped his pen in the wrong cup back in 1916. He died making shoe polish, and they buried him in a grave without his name on it. His name was Jan Czochralski, a Polish chemist working late one night at a lab in Berlin. He was writing up his notes, reached for his inkwell, and dunked his pen into a pot of melted tin instead. When he pulled it out, a thin thread of metal was hanging off the tip. He forgot about his notes and spent the rest of the night dipping the pen back in, pulling faster, pulling slower, until he figured out the speed controlled how long the thread got. When he looked closer, the whole thread was one single crystal. He wrote it up in 1918 as a way to measure how fast metals harden, and then it sat in a German chemistry journal for about 30 years. Then Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1947 and ran straight into a problem. The ones they built out of clumpy, multi-grain material were all over the place. To work reliably, t…