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Greenleaf W. Pickard was one of the first people to use silicone in the field of wireless communication. Pickard was born in 1877 and attended both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became actively interested in wireless telegraphy at the turn of the century and accepted a research position at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, where he was employed in 1902-1906. During this period he became very interested in the use of crystal rectifiers for reception and explored many combinations of metal semiconductor junctions.
In fact it appears that Pickard took the matter of crystal rectifiers very seriously indeed. In the course of his research, he tested over thirty thousand combinations of materials.
That's 30,000 different tests materials. Talk about dedication.
Commercial-grade silicon used at
the time for making different metals proved to be the best and purest
source. He obtained a patent on the use of silicon in rectifying diodes
during his years at AT&T. Then, in 1907, he and two associates organized a
company to market his patented detectors.
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These crystal
rectifiers, including units involving silicon, played a major role in
the evolution of coded wireless communications almost from the start and
were in prominently use through World War I. As might be expected, the
growing use and importance of vacuum
tubes, which were in a rapid state of improvement and development,
soon took over the spot light. Silicone was lost from the large picture for
a time but reemerged as more of its useful properties were discovered.