This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Silicon was not the first choice for semiconductor electronics. Germanium, silicon's neighbor one row down the periodic table, was the material of the first point contact transistor, built at Bell Labs in December 1947, and remained the dominant semiconductor material for transistors into the late 1950s.
Germanium lost that early lead for a reason that traces back to the same self limiting oxide layer that makes silicon useful in the first place. Germanium dioxide, the oxide germanium forms in air, is soluble in water, about 4.5 grams per liter at room temperature, far more soluble than silicon's own oxide, so it cannot be grown into a reliable, permanent insulating layer on a chip the way silicon dioxide can. Without a stable native oxide, germanium devices could not be patterned and etched with anything like the precision silicon's oxide chemistry allowed. Silicon's oxide layer, thin, tough and chemically inert, could be patterned, masked and etched in exact, repeatable steps, which is exactly what building millions of transistors onto a single chip requires.
Silicon also has a wider band gap than germanium, 1.14 electron volts against germanium's 0.67, meaning silicon devices tolerate higher operating temperatures before they start conducting current in ways a circuit designer did not intend, and silicon is vastly more abundant and cheaper to refine, being the second most common element in Earth's crust against germanium's comparative rarity. By the early 1970s the industry had shifted almost entirely to silicon, not because germanium's underlying semiconductor physics was inferior, but because silicon's specific chemistry, an oxide that grows and then stops, turned out to be the property manufacturing at scale actually needed.