When I was a kid, my paternal grandmother lived at 453 East Exchange Street in Akron, Ohio. 

I remember that pale yellow and green house well, but one thing I remember most clearly is smaller: a shirt box in a kitchen cupboard. Inside were marbles. Lots of marbles. 

There were colorful ones, unusual ones and some that today might send collectors scrambling for magnifying glasses and checkbooks. There were also old ‘recipes’ for creating different colors. 

As a kid, I wasn’t thinking about industrial history, intellectual property or manufacturing. They were marbles in my grandmother’s cupboard. It took me much of a lifetime to understand what I had seen. 

A Marble Factory in the Family
 Long before my visits, that address and the surrounding buildings had been home to the M.F. Christensen Marble Works, a pioneer in machine-made glass marbles. 

Martin F. Christensen is credited with inventing the first machine for making marbles from molten glass and receiving a U.S. patent for it. He and his son Charlie formed M.F. Christensen & Son, transforming a labor-intensive craft into a repeatable process capable of producing 10,000 marbles a day. 

Charlie was my great uncle, married to my grandmother’s sister, Nellie Baughman Christensen. Those marbles hadn’t reached the cupboard by accident. They were remnants of a family business that changed how marbles were made. 

It’s Mostly Sand
 Glass is made primarily from silica, or silicon dioxide — SiO2 — the principal constituent of sand. Heat it, add other ingredients and an ordinary material becomes remarkable. For Martin, the result was a glass marble. 

Decades later, I entered an industry built around another form of silicon. For 43 years, I have worked in semiconductor and electronics communications as dimensions shrank from microns to nanometers. 

Silicon dioxide also became essential to semiconductor manufacturing as an insulating material. 

Martin used molten glass and mechanical machinery to make better marbles. The companies of my career used silicon wafers, photolithography, deposition and etching to make better microchips. 

Yet the fundamentals sound familiar: silicon, oxygen, heat, precision, repeatability and the desire to make something better. 

There’s even a pleasing bit of geometry. Martin produced round glass marbles. Much of my career revolved around devices fabricated on round silicon wafers. 

Apparently, my family has had a thing for round pieces of silicon for quite some time. 

Grandmother Dietz’s Intellectual Property Department
 Which brings me back to those recipes. Combinations of minerals, chemicals and sand created colors and patterns, capturing knowledge accumulated through experimentation. 

Today we’d call that proprietary process technology. My grandmother kept it in a shirt box in her kitchen cupboard. Somewhere in there is a lesson about information security. 

Technology isn’t only the machine. It’s also understanding materials, controlling processes and learning what works. That was true for glass marbles a century ago, and it remains true for semiconductors. 

The Things We Don’t Know to Ask
 What strikes me now is how little I understood the box’s significance. That’s one of the strange things about childhood: you’re surrounded by history, but nobody tells you which parts you’re supposed to remember. 

You assume the house and the box will always be there, along with a chance to ask where something came from and why it mattered. 

Then one day you realize those things weren’t ordinary at all. 

I wish I could return to East Exchange Street and open that cupboard. I’d study the colors, read the recipes and ask about Charlie, Nellie, Martin and his machine. 

I once thought that shirt box held marbles. Now I know it held a connection between technologies separated by a century — between molten glass and semiconductor wafers, and between an Akron inventor and a kid who eventually spent 43 years communicating advances in electronics. 

Sometimes history doesn’t come with a plaque or sit behind glass in a museum. Sometimes it’s waiting in your grandmother’s kitchen cupboard for you to become old enough to understand what you’re seeing. 

Silicon, oxygen, heat, precision and ingenuity. Two technologies separated by nearly a century. Somehow, both became part of my story. 

Maybe some things really are in your DNA.  And this one is for all the marbles.