I can highly recommend this documentary from 1943, which shows the manufacturing of piezoelectric quartz crystals. The amount of skilled manual labor involved i

I can highly recommend this documentary from 1943, which shows the manufacturing of piezoelectric quartz crystals. The amount of skilled manual labor involved in the process is quite staggering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b--FKHCFjOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b--FKHCFjOM Photolithography in general substantially pre-dates the development of the IC. We were using it to produce printing plates in the 19th century. Breakthroughs in chemistry made photolithographic PCB manufacture possible by the early 1940s. It took us another 20 years and a huge array of discoveries and inventions to finally start producing useful ICs. Development of IC manufacturing required a very broad tech tree - better chemistry, better optics, better materials science, better process engineering and, most crucially, the invention of p-n junctions. Without the p-n junction, any effort to etch a practical integrated circuit is pretty much futile.