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This is the one critical material the US has a monopoly on. Found in exactly one place on the Earth's surface. Stop the ultra pure form of this from flowing and the world would slip backwards in time. 25 years. Which is why you don't hear much about it. Why the secrecy around it? How it's made, how to use it, are guarded like state secrets. To make a million iPhones you need 250 pounds of it. Not a nice to have, not "we'll figure something else out if we can't find it." Like Saudi Arabia's oil. China's rare earths. This is America's ace in the hole. Quartz.
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This is sand. This is sand. This is also sand. This could be sand. Aside from white tropical sand created by fish eating coral or volcanic sand from worn down lava, sand is quartz. Take this quartz crystal. Crush it up. What comes out is what's in these piles. Zoom in to one of the grains of sand in one of these piles. And you would see oxygen atoms sticking themselves to silicon atoms in a pyramid shape. Each pyramid tangled up with its neighbor. The tangle becomes a crystal called silica. Silica being the main ingredient.
Concrete is quite literally the foundation of our world. Concrete is not overly picky about the quality of its silica. A little bit of iron or magnesium tangled up in the crystal. Mix it together with lime. Add some water. Poured in a mold. Let it cure and you have concrete. But if you find yourself with pure silica, nothing else along for the ride. You, my friend, have found something exceptionally rare. Expect a knock on your door because humans discovered long ago. If you apply enough heat to silica, it'll turn into glass. The more pure the silica, the clearer the glass.
Far more recently, we discovered that if you want pure silicon, yes, that's silicon. If you want silicon, pure silica is the first thing you must find. The tank that fired first. One two thirds of the time, making the need to be able to see from inside the tank critical, with the field of view twice as wide as British or U.S. tanks. The lens on German tank sites often let German tank gunners see target and fire at enemy tanks before any tanks even knew they were there. Made big enough so a range finding system could be printed onto an inner layer of the lens. Germans used just one site when attacking. Gunners could sit in one station and look through a lens mounted next to the barrel. The gun. British and U.S. tanks used two: one whole periscope for looking around and spotting enemies, another for aiming the gun at them, forcing the commander to look through one to gauge distance, then yelled to the gunner to aim and fire. A one lens system that helped Germany steamrolled through France at the start of the war, and just six weeks after crossing the border, found themselves the captors of Paris. And the world's prized silica mine. Fontainebleau. Just 35 miles south. It was the purest silica the world had ever seen. Less pure silica and the larger, more high-powered the lens, the more distortion there is as you move away from the center of it. Rifle scope. Submarine periscopes. Tank sights. Bomb sights. Radar tubes. Fontainebleau was the single mine the entire British glass industry relied on. Gone. So, working at breakneck pace, two inferior silicon deposits in the US and the now famous Lochaline in Scotland, which would end up producing silica purer than Fontainebleau, were developed to feed the Allied war machine. Better late than never. By the midpoint of the war, the Allies had managed to catch up to Germany in glass production.
But it wasn't until two years after the war that the hyper-pure silica that powers the entire modern world was discovered. Despite 80 years of scouring the planet, nowhere else on Earth has come close to rivaling what comes out of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Fontainebleau is 99.7%. Lochaline 99.8%. Spruce Pine is a staggering 99.999% pure silica. It is impossible to make leading-edge semiconductors without the silica pulled out of Spruce Pine. Inside your phone. Your laptop. Weapons. Every server and every data center that powers AI. Air. Semiconductors formed on little sections of pure silicon, called chips, because the little square they're all built on is chipped off a much larger block. It is how that much larger block of silicon is made. That makes the quartz at Spruce Pine irreplaceable, truly irreplaceable. And that is not hyperbole, which I have to say, because it's extremely rare to have a hypercritical global industry in the modern world rely on one little piece of land. This irreplaceable land is the choke point that could be used to determine which countries can make advanced chips and which can't. This is why China can't suddenly overtake the US chip industry. Why taking Taiwan does not guarantee China would suddenly be able to make high-end chips. Because if the US stopped providing the quartz from Spruce Pine, Taiwan ceases to operate, full stop.
But where is this connection between quartz and silicon? This ultrapure quartz, ultrapure silica is turned into silicon. Not quite, actually. That is exactly what those who make silicon try to avoid. Pull apart your phone and inside you'll see where the brain that powers your phone is. Inside of this casing, right here is an advanced semiconductor that, in a pristine state, would look like this. Just three millimeters tall. A perfectly polished piece of pure silicon etched into it, using a process that could be mistaken for magic, are billions of tiny pathways. The width of each measured in atoms. We're talking 40, maybe 50 atoms wide for each path. If a random iron or oxygen atom is baked into the silicon, when an attempt to create one of these pathways is made, the pathway will not be made. Fail to create just one of the paths and the whole thing must be thrown out.
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To make a piece of silicon pure enough to power an iPhone, you must make sure that when silicon is melted down from its natural blocks and formed into a cylinder, chips can be sliced from the thing that's holding the melted silicon doesn't contaminate it. Silicon melts at 1300 degrees Celsius. 2400°F. It's very hot. Just about anything that comes into contact with the pool of molten silicon will, at minimum, shed off little pieces of itself that mix with the melt. Each rod of pure silicon comes out of one of these: a crucible made entirely out of quartz that comes from Spruce Pine. The quartz that comes from Spruce Pine, and only the quartz from Spruce Pine, must be used for every single one of these crucibles, because some of it will inevitably end up in the molten silicon. Boeing planes, iPhones, PlayStations, MRI machines. They all require at least one advanced chip that's been cut out of a silicon rod formed in a crucible made with quartz from Spruce Pine. This crucible is just 99.9% pure quartz, but just three inches wide. We're melting tin. I don't have the equipment, skills, or insurance, so attempt. Silicon crucibles used to make silicon stand 3 to 5ft tall. They're 2 to 3ft across and can only be used one time. For every 1 million iPhones Apple sells, a crucible will be built, filled up with molten silicon and destroyed by the process. Each chip in them starts out as silicon blocks that are melted inside the crucible, created using a process so difficult to perfect, it's not considered science, but black art. Because you can't just let the molten silicon cool and pull it out. Can't pour it into something else for fear of contamination.
A Polish engineer named Czochralski discovered using melted tin just like this, that discovered using melted tin just like this, that if you dipped an object into the metal, pulled it out in just the right way, you could grow a metal cylinder, an atomically perfect metal cylinder that, in the case of silicon, can be sliced into circular disks half a millimeter thick. A tiny, perfectly structured seed crystal melted on the tip of a metal rod and then dipped down until it just touches the surface of the molten silicon. Pulled up at an excruciatingly slow pace. The rod rotates. The molten silicon clings to the seed, and as it cools, because it's touching the perfect seed crystal, arranges its atoms in that exact same perfect pattern. Performed by people known as master growers. How fast to spin and pull, how to manage the temperature, the gases surrounding it, everything that allows a perfect silicon ingot to be grown is not considered a true science. There is no manual, just a feel. Learn through decades of apprenticeship to masters of the craft. Can't patent it because you'd have to reveal how to do it. The operators rely on sound, smell, or color. Even the masters fail 20 to 30% of the time despite perfect settings. These are the traits of a black art. Like how to make the blades inside every jet engine grown from a single nickel crystal into one giant crystal, molecule by molecule, using what's called the pigtail selector. Is known to a select few at GE, Pratt and Whitney, and Rolls-Royce. Or the handful of people at Canon and Leica who know how to polish the highest-end lenses used in cinematic cameras or semiconductor equipment. The Takumi technique. Nobody has cracked the alchemy of 1623. That's let Zildjian for 400 years make the world's best cymbals, using ingredients that every metallurgist will tell you should produce metal so brittle it shatters when struck by a drumstick. 80% copper, 20% tin with traces of silver. The process is only known by the CEO, delegating it out in parts to prevent anyone from knowing the whole secret.
The mountains that run down the east coast of the US used to be taller than the Himalayas, violently pushed to the sky when Africa smashed into North America, forming one giant supercontinent, Pangea. Friction along the line impact created incredible temperatures that melted rock 15 miles beneath the surface. Molten rock that would become the quartz pulled from the corridors of Spruce Pine. Call it a freak accident, like the asteroid that smashed into South Africa, creating a small area that's produced a quarter of the world's gold. But the freak in this accident wasn't the impact. It was the complete and total absence of water carrying things with it like a bus. Water drops molecules here and there that pollute the purity of quartz. Zero water, zero impurities. With zero impurities, the molten silicon dioxide was left to cook at high temperature for 100 million years. Very, very, very slowly being pushed towards the surface as the African continent pulled away from North America, letting the mountains shrink to where they are today, a fifth of their original height. Cool the molten rock quickly and it would have turned into tiny, messy crystals. But the 100 million year timer attached to this science experiment formed them into massive, organized crystals mined out of the ground by two very secretive companies who no doubt would prefer this video to not be made visible. In satellite imagery, you can see bright white veins of quartz trucks mingling about behind a 25ft high wall, patrolled as though an enemy is bound to arrive any moment, surrounded by nothing but a very small town, trees, and hills 500 miles away.
The semiconductor was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey. 30 years later, across the country, Intel perfected it, crowning themselves King of technology. Japan sliced off the memory chip part of Intel's business in the '90s. Two decades later, Taiwan Semiconductor sliced off the cutting-edge CPU chips after passing Intel on who could make the most complex chips. Apple, Nvidia, Google, Tesla. Anyone on the cutting edge of technology that needs the frontier of capability no longer looks to Intel for elite chips. They look to Taiwan. Taiwan now, with the crown firmly on, looks across the Taiwan Strait with a new and profound understanding of the famous words Intel's CEO used to describe the chip business: "Only the paranoid survive." This is the difference between the purity needed for solar panels and silicon wafers. Nine nines versus 11 nines. Those two nines are a major part of the moat between the US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan on one side, China on the other. There is no black art in nine-nine silicon. It is a science limited only by how much electricity you're willing to spend to turn silicon gas into crystals. China won the solar panel wars by deciding it would spend as much electricity as needed, feeding its solar industry free or nearly free electricity so they could make the tiles of nine-nine silicon that cover every solar panel cheap enough to undercut rival companies. Push the price down low enough, and everyone else will go out of business. It worked. And loath to be beholden to the current kings of silicon, it is a play. China is, without question, intent on running again for semiconductors. Once it's figured out the black heart of 11-nine silicon, stated by officials, outlined in plans. This is no secret. But in a twist of fate from 380 million years ago, regardless of who or what country wears the semiconductor crown, the most advanced piece of engineering humans have ever pulled off will, unless a miracle happens, always be tied to sand pulled out of the mountains around a small town in the United States.