War crystals, everlasting metal, and space-time annihilation: excavating the historical geography of early digital electronics

Abstract

Utilizing government archives, historical trade catalogues, and archival newspaper coverage, this research traces the origins of two key mineral supply chains for digital electronics: high purity quartz (used in semiconductor chips) and tantalum (used in capacitors, among other applications). Sourcing of both materials by United States firms were dramatically influenced by procurement initiatives during World War II developed for specialized communications technology demands, with massive investment and extraction occurring primarily in Brazil for high purity quartz and predominantly in Belgian Congo for tantalum. Both histories are situated within the broader context of the “critical mineral” as a political category and concept developed in the interwar period in the United States amidst the rise of political models like technocracy and the associative state. The ramifications of these supply chain histories on contemporary understanding of high purity quartz and tantalum are also discussed.