1968 · Czochralski Crystal Puller · Work 848 of 1,871
A crystal growing room in Mountain View under bright fluorescent tubes, close at the grey steel chamber of a crystal puller in a grey-blue frame, in its side a small round window of thick glass, inside a bell-shaped quartz crucible glowing orange-white, its last thin film of molten silicon drawn up into the tapered end of a silvery crystal hanging from a pull rod, two hands in pale sleeves entering from below, the right hand holding a very dark glass shield in a metal frame beside the window, the left hand on a black knurled knob, yellowish hoses, further puller towers with orange windows soft behind.
Who
Patricia Anderson was a crystal puller in Silicon Valley, one of the many women who made the raw material of semiconductors in the 1960s and 1970s and whose names hardly anyone knows today. Born in Seattle, she moved with her family in 1953, when she was almost five, to Petersburg on Mitkof Island in southeast Alaska. After graduating from high school in 1965 she went to Mountain View, California, studied scientific data processing and programmed in Fortran. In March 1968 a campus recruiter told her about an opening as a crystal puller at Elmat, then part of the Semimetals division of General Instrument. After a short winter in Alaska she came back; in 1972 Hewlett-Packard hired her away to grow crystals. In early 1975 she returned to Alaska for good, joined an apprenticeship with the electrical workers' union IBEW, worked on the pipeline and later installed business telephone systems. In 2020 she gave crucibles, crystals and papers to the Computer History Museum and told her story in an interview. One of the many production workers on whom Silicon Valley was built thus became visible.
The moment
On 20 June 1968, a few months after she started, Anderson stood in Elmat's crystal growing room on National Avenue in Mountain View. As she remembered it, eight to ten machines ran there day and night, and the room was bright under fluorescent tubes. Nothing was automated: through very dark visors in a metal frame she watched the melt of silicon, over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, adjusting pull rate and temperature by hand. The operating instructions said in capitals: "Don't lose control." At the end of a crystal you cannot see its bottom, so some melt is normally left in the crucible. That day Anderson drew every bit of the melt from the bell-shaped quartz crucible into the crystal. She wrote "Pat's Glory" and the date on the empty crucible and kept it for fifty years.
The other side
For this work Anderson earned two dollars an hour in the spring of 1968, two dollars ten by the summer, according to her pay stubs. Anyone looking for such women today finds few traces: the employment records of hourly workers are out of reach and names have changed; Anderson's story survives because she contacted the museum herself. Later, at Hewlett-Packard, she etched wafers with acids under fume hoods; with no scrubbers on the roof, the exhaust pitted the paint of the cars in the parking lot. In Alaska she had breast cancer three times. She wrote to a research group to ask whether there was a connection. She never heard back.
What the sources leave open: Everything about Anderson and this day comes from her 2020 interview with the Computer History Museum and the objects she donated; there is no second, independent source. Whether the machine had a round sight glass is not documented. The inscription was added later to the cold crucible and is left out of the picture. Only her hands are shown, because there is no public-domain photograph of her.