focusing on galena. His detectors consisted of a small galena crystal with a metal point contact pressed against it with a thumbscrew, mounted inside a closed waveguide ending in a horn antenna to collect the microwaves. Bose passed a current from a battery through the crystal, and used a galvanometer to measure it. When microwaves struck the crystal the galvanometer registered a drop in resistance of the detector. At the time scientists thought that radio wave detectors functioned by some mechanism analogous to the way the eye detected light, and Bose found his detector was also sensitive to visible light and ultraviolet, leading him to call it an artificial retina. He patented the detector 30 September 1901. This is often considered the first patent on a semiconductor device. Pickard: first commercial detectors Greenleaf Whittier Pickard may be the person most responsible for making the crystal detector a practical device. Pickard, an engineer with the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Co. invented the rectifying contact detector, discovering rectification of radio waves in 1902 while experimenting with a coherer detector consisting of a steel needle resting across two carbon blocks. On 29 May 1902 he was operating this device, listening to a radiotelegraphy station. Coherers required an external current source to operate, so he had the coherer and telephone earphone connected in series with a 3 cell battery to provide power to operate the earphone. Annoyed by background "frying" noise caused by the current through the carbon, he reached over to cut two of the battery cells out of the circuit to reduce the current The generation of an audio signal without a DC bias battery made Pickard realize the device was acting as a rectifier. During the next four years, Pickard conducted an exhaustive search to find which substances formed the most sensitive detecting contacts, eventually testing thousands of minerals, and discovered about 250 rectifying crystals. In 1906 he obtained a sample of fused silicon, an artificial product recently synthesized in electric furnaces, and it outperformed all other substances. He patented the silicon detector 30 August 1906. In 1907 he formed a company to manufacture his detectors, Wireless Specialty Products Co., and the silicon detector was the first crystal detector to be sold commercially. Pickard went on to produce other detectors using the crystals he had discovered; the more popular being the iron pyrite "Pyron" detector and the zincite–chalcopyrite crystal-to-crystal "Perikon"