Silicon
The second most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the hardest to make perfect.
Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the hardest to make perfect. It makes up 27.7% of it, almost always bound to oxygen as silica: sand, quartz, granite. It melts at 1,414 °C. Its value for electronics comes from a strange property: pure, it barely conducts; doped with a pinch of foreign atoms, it conducts on demand. The whole chain running from the board in your phone back to quartz is about purifying it, then dirtying it exactly as intended.
Sources
- 1,414 °C Silicon — Element information, Royal Society of Chemistry, retrieved 11 October 2026.