9781422279496

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Silicon

Separating Silicon Because silicon is so prevalent in our lives, and in the rocks all around us, it is difficult to think of it as something that needed to be “discovered.” But chemically, the history of the discovery of silicon has not been easy. Early in the 1800s, most scientists accepted the fact that silicon was an element. However, they had not yet found a way to separate out a sample of pure silicon. The process proved to be more elusive than separating other pure elements.

In the early 1800s, Sir Humphry Davy, an English scientist, came up with a meth- od for separating individual elements from tightly bonded molecules or compounds. He found that if he melted the compounds and then passed an electric current through them, the individual elements in the com- pound would separate out. This was such an effective method that Davy was able to

English scientist Humphry Davy

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