I, Chip

"Not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me."

— Leonard Read, I, Pencil (1958)

Seventy years ago, Leonard Read invited a pencil to tell its story. The lesson has not changed. Only the complexity has.

I am a computer chip.

I am a thin square of silicon, sealed in plastic, small enough to disappear into your phone, your car, your thermostat, or your pacemaker. You notice me only when I fail. Yet each day you ask more of me than entire rooms of machinery once delivered in a year.

You may say I am made in factories, designed by engineers, financed by corporations, and regulated by governments. Each of these statements is true. And yet no single person on earth knows how to make me. Not the physicist who first described the principles that birthed me, or the executive who approves the investment, or the bureaucrat who decides where I may be sold. Gather them in one room, and they could not produce me. They could not come close.

The knowledge that brings me into being resides in no single mind. It is scattered across continents and carried by people who will never meet. By any reasonable measure, I should not exist. The tolerances are too exacting, the coordination too vast, and the chain of events so long and so precise that to describe it fully would exhaust a library. And yet here I am, billions of me, at work in pockets and server rooms around the world.

If you can see the wonder in that fact, I can tell you my story. Or rather, the story of what I require.

Sand

I begin as quartz (silicon dioxide), formed deep underground long before anyone imagined computation.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near a small town called Spruce Pine, a geological accident three hundred and eighty million years old left behind deposits of unusual purity. Two colliding continents generated the heat and pressure to form quartz crystals largely free of the impurities found elsewhere. Today, these mines supply roughly eighty percent of the world's high-purity quartz used in semiconductor manufacturing.

The quartz is not yet me. It is heated, refined, and refined again with each pass, stripping away contamination that would be invisible to all but the most precise instruments. At this level, "almost pure" is the same as useless. A single misplaced atom in a crystal lattice can undo everything that follows.

The men who quarry this rock and the chemists who refine it may never hold a finished chip in their hands, but their precision lives inside every transistor I contain.

Electricity

I require electricity delivered steadily and without interruption.

A momentary fluctuation, even too brief for your eye to notice, can ruin layers built one atop another over days of painstaking work. Power plants operate continuously, and electrical grids are kept in balance by engineers monitoring loads around the clock. Damaged lines are repaired at all hours, in all weather, by people whose sole task is to keep the current available when it is needed.

None of them needs to understand how I work. Their contribution is constancy, and it is indispensable.

Chemicals

I am shaped by chemicals that most people can not pronounce.

Hydrofluoric acid carves my patterns. Phosphine and arsine gases alter my conductivity atom by atom. Photoresists — light-sensitive coatings made from compounds of tin, zirconium, or fluorinated polymers — harden or dissolve where needed, defining the boundaries of circuits narrower than a virus. These materials come from chemical plants in Japan, refineries in Germany, and specialty laboratories in the United States and South Korea. They must arrive on time, in exact concentrations, and at precise temperatures, or entire production runs are lost.

The chemist in Osaka who calibrates a photoresist formula may never know which device carries her work. I carry it.

Water

I demand water of extraordinary purity.

Not clean water. Not filtered water. Water stripped of virtually everything that makes it water in the natural world — minerals, microbes, dissolved gases, organic molecules — reduced to little more than hydrogen and oxygen in strict molecular arrangement. The semiconductor industry measures contamination in parts per trillion.

Water suitable for drinking would destroy me. Water suitable for surgery would destroy me. Even water that seems pure to the most exacting municipal standard contains contaminants that, at my scale, are ruinous.

Cities are built around the abundance of water. I depend on its absolute refinement.

Light

Light writes me. And the story of that light deserves its own telling.

In Veldhoven, a small city in the south of the Netherlands, a company called ASML builds the machines that print my circuits. Each machine weighs 180 tons, contains more than 100,000 components sourced from over 800 suppliers across 17 countries, and costs up to $400 million. It takes seven partially loaded cargo jets to deliver one.

Inside, a laser fires fifty thousand times per second at droplets of molten tin, each one smaller than a human hair. The first pulse flattens the droplet. The second vaporizes it into a plasma that emits extreme ultraviolet light, a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers, invisible to the human eye. This light is gathered by mirrors polished to a smoothness measured in individual atoms, manufactured by Zeiss in Germany with tolerances that would have seemed fantastical just a generation ago, and directed through a mask of alternating silicon and molybdenum layers to etch patterns onto my surface.

The scientists who first described the behavior of this light are long gone. Their equations remain.

And those equations were written by human hands, guided by a pencil. That pencil was made of wood and graphite, rubber and metal; materials drawn from forests, mines, refineries, and workshops spread across the world. No one who used it knew how to make it. No one who made it knew what would be written with it.

I am etched today by machines that those equations made possible, designed on paper by a tool whose own existence once demanded the same explanation as mine.

Symbols

Before I exist in matter, I exist in symbols.

I am imagined, tested, corrected, and revised in software written by programmers who did not invent the mathematics beneath it. Their tools run on operating systems they did not design, executed on machines that already contain chips like me, designed years earlier by engineers who could not have foreseen the purpose I would serve.

I am designed by my ancestors.

This fact alone should give pause to anyone who believes complex systems require a central planner. No one drew the blueprint that connects my earliest forebears to my present form. The path was walked by thousands of independent actors, each solving the problem in front of them, each building on what came before.

Assembly

When my layers are complete, I am cut, tested, packaged, and shipped.

I move through factories in Taiwan, testing facilities in Malaysia, and packaging plants in the Philippines. I cross oceans inside containers whose captains know only their destination. Customs forms are stamped in languages unfamiliar to one another. Technicians receive me because the labels are correct and the paperwork is in order.

Delays occur. Adjustments are made. Problems are solved by people who will never see the device I ultimately serve, for customers whose needs they will never know. And yet I arrive.

Knowledge

No one involved in my creation could make me alone.

The miner in North Carolina does not know the chemist in Osaka. The chemist does not know the lens-grinder in Oberkochen. The lens-grinder does not know the programmer in Austin. The programmer does not know the ship captain in Kaohsiung. The captain does not know the technician in Penang who will test me before I reach your hands. No one knows the whole of me. I do not even know the whole of myself.

And yet this astounding coordination proceeds without a maestro.

What connects these people is not a shared plan. No committee assigns their tasks. What coordinates them is something simpler and far more powerful: voluntary exchange, guided by prices.

When demand for me rises, the price of high-purity quartz ticks upward in Spruce Pine. The mine expands a shift. A chemical supplier in Tokyo notices rising orders and increases production. A shipping company adjusts its routes. Each actor responds to a signal, and the whole system adapts. When a new material proves cheaper or a process more efficient, the network reorganizes itself through a million independent decisions made by people who have never heard of one another.

This is the phenomenon that Leonard Read wanted the pencil to explain. It has not become less miraculous in the decades since. If anything, the fact that this spontaneous order now produces objects of my complexity should deepen the astonishment, not diminish it.

This order was not designed. It emerged. And it endures only so long as it is allowed to.

Memory

I enter a world that rarely pauses to marvel.

Children expect screens to glow. Adults expect them to respond. What once astonished is now assumed, as if my arrival were a law of nature rather than the outcome of a process so intricate and so collaborative that its full description exceeds human comprehension.

I make no such assumption. I know how easily the web of cooperation that produced me can be disrupted by wars, restrictions, mandates, or the confidence of those who believe they could organize my creation more rationally if only given the authority.

The testimony offered by a pencil decades ago speaks just as clearly in my smaller, denser, more improbable world.

A Lesson

I am a computer chip.

I am not the product of a single plan, a single genius, or a single nation. I am the residue of voluntary cooperation among millions of strangers — across borders, across languages, across generations. I require no central authority to coordinate my birth. I require only that millions of people remain free to solve the problems nearest to them, in ways they understand best, and to exchange the results of their effort with others who value it.

What I ask is modest, and it is the same thing the pencil asked:

Leave all creative energies uninhibited.

A note from the author: When I was in my early twenties, I stumbled across clips of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and heard him describe an essay in which a pencil explains how it is made. The essay was "I, Pencil," written by Leonard Read in 1958. It changed how I see the world. The argument is deceptively simple — no single person knows how to make a pencil — but its implications run deep. I wrote "I, Chip" as an homage, in the hope that Read's insight might reach a new generation through an object they carry every day. If this piece moved you, read the original. It is short, it is free, and it is one of the most important essays of the twentieth century.