Martin F. Christensen is credited with inventing the first machine for making marbles from molten glass and receiving a U.S. patent for his invention. He and his son Charlie formed M.F. Christensen & Son and helped transform something that had traditionally required considerable hand labor into a repeatable manufacturing process.

Charlie Christensen was also my great uncle, married to my grandmother's sister, Nellie Baughman Christensen. So those marbles didn't end up in my grandmother's kitchen cupboard by accident.  They were remnants of a family business and of an invention that helped change the way marbles were made.

Martin had essentially done what inventors and engineers have been doing forever: he looked at an existing manufacturing process and thought there had to be a better way.

Then he built it, churning out 10,000 machine-made marbles every day.

Today we'd probably call it manufacturing automation, process innovation or disruptive technology.  In Akron at the beginning of the 20th century, they called it making marbles.

It's Mostly Sand

Here's where the story gets interesting.

Glass is made primarily from silica, or silicon dioxide — SiO2 — the principal constituent of sand. Heat it to sufficiently high temperatures, combine it with other ingredients and you can transform an ordinary-looking material into something remarkable.

In Martin Christensen's case, the result was a glass marble.

Decades later, I entered an industry built around another form of silicon.

For 43 years, I have worked in corporate communications in the semiconductor and electronics industry. Silicon wafers became such a routine part of my professional world that I rarely gave the word itself much thought.

Silicon.

It was there when I began my career and it was still there four decades later as semiconductor dimensions shrank from microns to nanometers and the devices built on those wafers became almost unimaginably complex.

Silicon dioxide itself has played a foundational role in semiconductor manufacturing, particularly as an insulating material and, historically, as the gate oxide that helped make modern integrated circuits possible.

And one day the connection finally occurred to me. I'd been around this stuff before.

Separated by a Century

The technologies could hardly appear more different.

Martin worked with molten glass and mechanical machinery. The semiconductor companies of my career worked with wafers, photolithography, deposition, etching and processes measured in dimensions that would have been almost inconceivable in his time.

He was trying to make a better marble.

We were trying to make better microchips.

His finished products could be held between two fingers. The transistors I spent my career writing about eventually became so small that billions of them could fit on a single chip.

Yet strip away a century of technological progress and some of the fundamentals sound remarkably familiar.

• Silicon
• Oxygen
• Heat.
• Materials science
• Precision
• Repeatability
• Manufacturing

And the relentless desire to figure out how to make something better.

There's even a pleasing bit of geometry to it all.

Martin's challenge was producing consistently round glass marbles.

Much of my career revolved around devices fabricated on consistently round silicon wafers.

Apparently, my family has had a thing for round pieces of silicon for quite some time.

Grandmother Dietz's Intellectual Property Department

Which brings me back to those recipes in the shirt box.

I love that they were called recipes.

Different combinations of minerals, chemicals and sand helped create different colors and patterns in the glass. Those recipes represented knowledge accumulated through experimentation — how much of this, how much of that and what happened when you changed the mixture or the process.

Today we'd probably call that proprietary process technology.  My grandmother kept it in a shirt box in her kitchen cupboard.  Somewhere in there is a lesson about information security.  But there's also a larger lesson about innovation.

Technology isn't only the machine. It's the accumulated knowledge behind the machine. It's understanding materials, controlling processes and learning through countless experiments what works and what doesn't.

That was true for glass marbles more than a century ago. It's certainly true for semiconductors today.

The Things We Don't Know to Ask

What strikes me most now isn't that I had access to old marbles or recipes.  It's how little I understood their significance.

That's one of the strange things about childhood. You're surrounded by history but nobody tells you which parts you're supposed to remember.  You assume grandmother's house will always be there.  You assume the shirt box will always be in the cupboard.  You assume there will always be another opportunity to ask where something came from, who made it and why it mattered.

Then one day you realize those ordinary things weren't ordinary at all.

I wish I could go back to 453 East Exchange Street and open that cupboard again.  I'd look at the marbles differently now.

I'd study the colors. I'd read the recipes. I'd ask questions about Charlie and Nellie, about Martin and his machine and about what it was like when marbles were being manufactured there.

Mostly, though, I'd appreciate the wonderful improbability of what was sitting inside that box.

Full Circle

I used to think that shirt box contained marbles.  Now I realize it contained something else.

It held a connection between two technologies separated by nearly a century. Between molten glass and semiconductor wafers. Between an inventor making marbles in Akron and a kid who visited that same address and eventually spent 42 years communicating advances in semiconductors and electronics.

I couldn't possibly have known any of that when I reached into my grandmother's shirt box.  To me, they were just marbles.

But sometimes history doesn't come with a plaque. Sometimes it isn't protected behind glass in a museum or carefully catalogued in an archive.  Sometimes it's sitting in your grandmother's kitchen cupboard, waiting for you to become old enough to understand what you're looking at.

Silicon, oxygen, heat, precision and ingenuity.  Two technologies separated by nearly a century.  And somehow, both became part of my story.

Maybe some things really are in your DNA.

And this one is for all the marbles.

About the Author

Brent Dietz, director of corporate communications at Qorvo, has seen a lot of engineering and technology during 30⁺ years in the tech industry. His primary role is making geek-speak understandable to the non-geek public, reporters and non-technical analysts. It's challenging — simplifying without distorting — and it helps to have a sense of humor. Brent does, which he shares with Microwave Journal readers from time to time.

This article first appeared in Brent's Musings in Microwave Journal