IMO there were enough critical precursor technologies to start making discrete semiconductor devices from silicon by about the late 1920s, had a large industria

IMO there were enough critical precursor technologies to start making discrete semiconductor devices from silicon by about the late 1920s, had a large industrial backer known the useful properties of such devices. They had most of the pieces for "how" by then but didn't discover the "why" until a generation later. And of course people spent a lot of time pursuing dead ends before discovering which industrial techniques would successfully combine to make silicon suitable for semiconductor devices, with properties surprisingly different from silicon of only 99.5% purity. - The electric arc furnace, from the late 19th century, enabled the large scale production of crude silicon. - The crystal bar process, from 1925, is similar to the Siemens process developed in the 1950s for refining purified volatile silicon compounds to electronic-purity elemental silicon. - The Czochralski process, from 1915, permitted the growth of large single crystals of purified silicon. There's a great review article from 1981, available through sci-hub, if you want more details about the history of purified silicon electronic devices: "Twenty Five Years of Semiconductor-Grade Silicon" DOI: 10.1002/pssa.2210640102