Silicon

Silicon is the second most abundant element in the crust after oxygen, and the two together as silica and silicates make up most of the rock underfoot. Berzelius first isolated it in reasonably pure form in 1824. Its industrial dominance rests on an accident of chemistry: unlike germanium, silicon grows a stable, insulating, self-passivating oxide, which is exactly what a MOSFET gate needs, and that single property is why the transistor moved to silicon in the late 1950s and never left. Electronic-grade silicon is pulled from a melt by the Czochralski method into 300 mm single crystals refined to better than 99.9999999% purity — nine nines, among the purest bulk materials humans make. Note that silicon and silicone are not interchangeable: the latter is a synthetic polymer with a silicon-oxygen backbone.