Copper

Copper is a soft, reddish metal and, after silver, the best conductor of electricity. People have used it for about 10,000 years, first as nuggets found in the ground, later smelted and mixed with tin to make bronze. Today it is mined mostly in Chile, Peru and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then purified with electricity to about 99.99%.

The television is full of it. Copper is drawn into copper wire, etched into the traces of every printed circuit board and flexible printed circuit, and laid down as fine wiring inside each silicon die and along the thin-film transistor array. It forms the lead frame of chip packages, most of brass and phosphor bronze, and sits at the center of copper phthalocyanine.