Jan Czochralski, a Polish metallurgist working in Berlin, accidentally discovers in 1916 the method for growing single crystals: after inadvertently dipping a pen nib into a crucible of molten tin and slowly withdrawing it, he obtains a single-crystal metal thread. He publishes the method in Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie in 1918. Adapted to silicon in the 1950s by Gordon Teal (Bell Labs), the Czochralski method is today the standard process for producing the single-crystal silicon ingots from which wafers are cut for 95% of the world's semiconductors: microprocessors, memory, solar panels. Without the Czochralski method, the semiconductor industry as we know it does not exist. Czochralski died in 1953 in anonymity in Poland; his name rarely appears outside materials engineering textbooks.