21 These properties of silicon, as well as the scarcer and more heat-volatile germanium, were discovered in World War Two radar research; see Electronic Genie: The Tangled History of Silicon by Frederick Seitz and Norman G. Einspruch (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1998). Military support was, of course, crucial to transistor research: from 1953 to 1955, half the money for transistor development at Bell Labs was military. During the Korean War, Bell’s brilliant William Shockley had the bright idea that a mortar shell driven by a microwatt junction transistor could be detonated just above the ground, raining shrapnel upon the heads of the Communist enemy. The first fully transistorized digital computer was developed for the Air Force in 1954 by Bell’s Whippany lab, to command guided missiles (Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age [New York: Norton, 1997], pp. 187-88, 203-04).