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Discovery
The name germanium goes back to Germany, the country where this element was discovered in 1886. It was first detected in the mineral argyrodite, which came from the Himmelsfürst mine in the Erzgebirge Mountains. During the investigation, the German chemist Clemens Alexander Winkler discovered that, in addition to silver and sulphur, it must also contain a previously unknown element. After several months and with the help of various chemical processes, he succeeded in isolating it. The discovery of germanium, so named by Winkler, closed the gap in the periodic table between silicon and tin. Its existence had previously been predicted by one of the inventors of the periodic table, the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, who had referred to it as „eka-silicon“.
Clemens Alexander Winkler, AI-generated
Extraction
The targeted extraction of germanium began in the 1940s, when the transistor was the first commercial application. Then, as now, the raw material was not extracted in the company's own mines, but as a by-product of other raw materials. In 1953, the New York Times reported on the growing demand for germanium and its extraction as part of zinc ore mining in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. In addition to the USA, other Western and African countries as well as Russia and Eastern Europe also became producers over the next few decades, and it was not until the early 2000s that China established its current quasi-monopoly. This is shown by data from the US Geological Survey and the German raw materials agency DERA.
Historical areas of application
Laboratory in the early 20th century, symbolic image
The first area of application for germanium was point contacts in Schottky diodes for radar receivers during the Second World War. Building on this, US researchers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley developed the first transistor in 1947, paving the way for the modern age of electronics. This tiny, fast switch for precisely controlling the flow of electricity made many later inventions possible. Compared to vacuum tubes - the basis of early computers - it required significantly less space, consumed hardly any electricity and generated less heat. In the years that followed, germanium transistors became the standard in devices such as radios, the first computers and telephone systems. The three inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their development in 1956.
In the 1960s, germanium was replaced in most transistors by silicon, which was more stable, more heat-resistant and more suitable for mass production. However, germanium remained in demand for special applications such as gamma ray detectors. Its current applications include silicon-germanium chips for modern electronics. Remarkably, the invention of microchips was only made possible by germanium. In 1958, the US engineer Jack Kilby built the first integrated circuit based on this raw material - an early foundation of chip technology.