Germanium Germanium Germanium is a chemical element with symbol Ge and atomic number 32. It is a lustrous, hard, grayish-white metalloid in the carbon group, chemically similar to its group neighbors tin and silicon. Pure germanium is a semiconductor with an appearance similar to elemental silicon. Like silicon, germanium naturally reacts and forms complexes with oxygen in nature. Because it seldom appears in high concentration, germanium was discovered comparatively late in the history of chemistry. Germanium ranks near fiftieth in relative abundance of the elements in the Earth's crust. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev predicted its existence and some of its properties
Post-transition metal which verge on the nonmetals. The peculiar metals occur towards the ends of the rows of the periodic table and include 'approximately:' gallium, indium, and thallium; carbon, silicon '(both of which have some metallic properties, though we have previously treated them as nonmetals),' germanium and tin; arsenic, antimony, and bismuth; and selenium '(which is partly metallic)' and tellurium. The ordinary metals have centro-symmetrical crystalline structures whereas the peculiar metals have structures involving directional bonding. More recently, Joshua observed that the peculiar metals have mixed metallic-covalent bonding. Farrell and Van Sicien use the term "poor metal", for simplicity, 'to denote one