I had the day off school due to a bomb threat so I had some extra time to work in the shop and had my first success with thermally grown SiO2. The process is very simple. At the time, I didn’t have a tube furnace so I put the wafers in a pottery kiln that went up to 1000c and poured 25ml of water into the top of the kiln through a small opening manually every 5 minutes for about 6 hours to saturate the furnace with water vapor. This wet oxidation technique allowed me to grow the field oxide for my first few semiconductor devices, diodes.