Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

despite its prodigious steel output, despite making 80 per cent of the world’s pens, the ability to produce the tiny steel ball bearing and socket that comprise the primary technology of these pens still eluded Chinese manufacturers. Chinese-made nibs were often rough and scratchy; they ran out of ink or stopped working after a few days. When manufacturers wanted a quality nib, they would have to import the steel parts from Japan, Germany or Switzerland instead.

Rio Tinto alone detonates around a million blast holes a year here, which averages out at one every 30 seconds, though they are usually grouped a few hundred at a time.

Some have estimated that one or two hundred precious archaeological and cultural sites and objects are destroyed each year—invariably with government approval. This, after all, is a land where the cultural history is as rich as the reserves of iron ore.

The per capita steel quotient in the U.S. and the UK has been more or less flat for a few decades, implying that at some point, when a society has enough hospitals and railway tracks, it reaches saturation.

More than two-thirds of America’s steel is now made from scrap, as old skyscrapers and cars are reconstituted into new bar and plate.[8]

Much is made of other, more obscure metals, from battery materials like cobalt and nickel to rare earth metals like neodymium, yet no other substance can match copper for its sheer elemental importance. Few other metals have quite the same combination of functions: its ability to conduct heat and electricity through its atomic matrix; its natural ductility, which allows it to be rolled and pulled and twisted into wires without snapping; its strength, its resistance to corrosion and its suitability for recycling.[4]

For a vivid illustration of the magic, try dropping a strong, heavy magnet on to a slab of pure copper—or, easier still, go online where a few people have filmed precisely that. What happens next is quite extraordinary: the magnet falls like any metallic object would, but just before it hits the copper it hovers for a moment, suspended in mid-air, before slowly rotating and gently resting on the surface.

is the almighty, invisible force of electromagnetism, as the electrons within the copper go into a frenzy when the magnet approaches.

Indeed, what you are doing when you pass that magnet next to the copper is inducing an electrical current. What you are doing is generating the single most important force of the modern era.

The generators and transformers of our electrical systems—made mostly of steel and copper—should be championed as among the most important (and for that matter brilliant) inventions in history, yet they usually get ignored in favour of the computer or the jet engine.

Even solar panels, the one mainstream form of power generation where the electricity doesn’t come from rotating copper around a magnet, still have large quantities of copper in their insides. In short, if it has an electrical current, that current will mostly exist because of copper.

In the eighteenth century the British navy also began to sheath its ships’ hulls with the metal—copper bottoming, as it was known—making them faster, more manoeuvrable, able to stay at sea longer and, most importantly of all, giving the hulls resistance to the rotting and fouling that often occurred in warmer waters. Copper bottoming, one of the early technologies of the maritime era, helped Britannia rule the waves.

the less pure the atomic structure of your silicon or germanium wafer, the harder it is for electrons to pass through it. And so it went for copper wires.

Instead of just melting the copper ores to release the metal, they would electrolyse them as well—dunking them in a solution and passing a current through it.

And electrolytically refined copper was far purer: the only variety pure enough for the advanced electric motors and generators that would power the future.

He was not the first person to invent a lightbulb—that accolade probably goes to Joseph Swan, a scientist from the north-east of England, though a fair few people had come up with prototypic bulbs even before him. But much as he did for concrete, Edison turned lightbulbs into a mass-market product. He realised that it was not enough to manufacture a lightbulb or clever electrical appliances; he would have to build the electrical infrastructure into which those devices could be plugged as well. And that meant lots and lots of copper: copper for the wires he buried under the streets of New York, copper to go into homes and workplaces, copper to be strung around the wheels of generators. So much copper, in fact, that even though its price was falling, Edison still needed such vast quantities of the stuff that it threatened to put him out of business.

So what about all those areas that weren’t within a mile of a power station? The answer was provided by Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, who pioneered the use of alternating currents. While the current in Edison’s wires would travel in one direction, like water down a river, the current in Westinghouse and Tesla’s wires pulsed, a little like the waves in the sea. The genius of AC was that it could send high voltages along very thin wires, which meant, first and foremost, that the world would not run out of copper and, second, that you no longer had to locate your power station right inside your neighbourhood.