More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ed Conway
Read between
July 8 - July 31, 2024
The mine itself is located on the slopes of a hill called Mount Tenabo, a sacred site for the tribespeople of the Western Shoshone. The process of mining is comparatively simple, and echoes the techniques used by gold miners back in the nineteenth century, albeit at a gargantuan scale. The rocks are blasted out of the earth, crushed and then ground into a fine dust, and eventually mixed with a cyanide solution which helps separate out the gold itself.
For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig about 5,000 tonnes of earth. That’s nearly the same weight as ten fully laden Airbus A380 super-jumbos, the world’s largest passenger planes—for one bar of gold.
Without concrete, copper and fibre optics there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet. The world, dare I say, would not end if Twitter or Instagram suddenly ceased to exist; if we suddenly ran out of steel or natural gas, however, that would be a very different story.
It is all very well knowing the price of something, but price is not the same thing as importance.
But we tend not to pay much attention to these kinds of things until we run short of them. That was certainly the case with borosilicate glass, which received a sudden flurry of interest in the wake of the COVID pandemic, amid worries that the main thing holding back the distribution of vaccinations might not be the pharmaceuticals themselves but the containers in which they would be shipped.
The UK government was similarly startled in late 2021 when it suddenly ran short of carbon dioxide and discovered that without CO2 the food industry is unable not merely to make sparkling drinks fizzy but also to preserve and store foods, as well as to stun pigs and chickens before slaughter. This could all be traced back to the sudden closure of two fertiliser plants in Cheshire and Teesside. The majority of Britain’s CO2 supplies came, it turned out, from these two sites whose primary purpose was to make something else altogether: ammonia. And since natural gas prices were high and since
...more
The wood in the pencil comes from cedars growing in western America, sawn down with steel made in blast furnaces and finished in workshops. It is milled into slats and dried and dyed and dried again, and the slats are grooved and glued into place. The lead in the pencil’s core is graphite mined in Sri Lanka, refined and mixed with clay from Mississippi, alongside chemicals made from animal fat and sulphuric acid. The wood and lead of the pencil are coated in lacquer made from castor oil derived from castor beans, resins are used to label it, and it is capped on its base with brass made from
...more
Surely if we spent a little more time contemplating how the items upon which we rely actually get produced, we might not be so baffled when they run short. Thanks to Read’s essay, millions of economics students now know their way around the supply chain of a pencil, but what about a smartphone or a vaccine or a battery? What about the supply chain for carbon dioxide or borosilicate glass?
Long before the chip shortage, I had undertaken to try to tell the story of a grain of silicon, all the way from the quarry through to the semiconductor foundry and assembly plant where it would become part of a smartphone. I soon realised that, much as with Read’s pencil, no single person, even those working on the supply chain itself, could fully explain to me the processes—even the very simplified processes—that took place at each stage along this journey. Those working at foundries understood plenty about photolithography and chemical abrasion, but little about how the ultra-pure silicon
...more
The Material World is what undergirds our everyday lives. Without this place your beautifully designed smartphone wouldn’t switch on, your brand new electric car would have no battery. The Material World will not provide you with a gorgeous home, but it will ensure your home can actually stand up. It will keep you warm, clean, fed and well, however little heed you may pay it.
We go to far more extraordinary lengths to extract copper and oil, iron and cobalt, manganese and lithium from the ground. We dig for sand, for rock, for salt, for stone. And we do so at an astonishing rate. Far from being a sideshow, this activity is getting more important, not less.
In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. Consider that for a moment. In a single year we extracted more resources than humankind did in the vast majority of its history—from the earliest days of mining to the industrial revolution, world wars and all. Nor was 2019 a one-off. In fact, you could have said precisely the same thing about every year since 2012. And far from diminishing, our appetite for raw materials
...more
For every tonne of fossil fuels, we exploit 6 tonnes of other materials—mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts and chemicals. Even as we citizens of the ethereal world pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. But, somehow, we have deluded ourselves into believing precisely the opposite.
This book about the Material World is told through six materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium.
Our species has mastered and affected the natural environment more than any other in history yet our understanding of precisely what’s happening to it when we experiment with it—burning this or reshaping that—remains surprisingly shallow. In much the same way as we do not fully understand the physics of glass, we don’t entirely comprehend what’s happening at a molecular level when concrete sets, or what’s happening in the furnace when we turn quartz into metallic silicon. Mysteries abound.
In the three years between 2018 and 2020, China poured more concrete than the U.S. had in its entire existence, from 1865, when it opened its first plant producing Portland cement—that variety patented by Joseph Aspdin—via the construction of the Hoover Dam, the U.S. highway system, Manhattan and everything else through to the present day.[22]
There are semiconductors everywhere: in your smartphone there are many different varieties, some serving as the sensors in the camera, others storing photos of your family. Most exciting, however, are those that act as the brains of our devices, where the more transistors you have, the more calculations you can carry out and the more powerful the computer. The latest such chips can fit roughly 15 million transistors into a dot the size of a single full stop on this page. The transistors in today’s smartphones are not just smaller than a red blood cell (about a thousand times smaller, as it
...more
No high-purity quartz means no Czochralski crucibles, which means no monocrystalline silicon wafers, which means, well, the end of computer chip manufacture as we know it. We would adapt; find a new process or an alternative substance. But it would be a grisly few years. Perhaps this is why those who work in high-purity quartz are so jumpy. Perhaps that’s why the man who passed on that scary thought exercise insisted that I didn’t print the type of powder that would play such havoc with the processing of those mines in North Carolina, which quietly serve this tiny but pivotal role in the
...more
The process to create the world’s fastest technology turns out to be surprisingly slow and laborious; by one calculation there are more than 10,000 different steps over these months. By the time the work at the fab is finished, months after it began, there may be as many as a hundred different layers of transistors on our silicon wafer, though each is so ineffably thin that, to the human eye, the whole thing looks little bigger than when it entered.
These days your average chip may be made up of 60 elements, compared with around 15 in the 1990s and perhaps 11 in the 1980s. The typical smartphone, with its display and battery, might contain as many as 70, making it one of the most advanced manifestations of chemistry in history.
When you look at these transistors in an electron microscope (and that is the only way to see them) they look a little like a triple cheeseburger without a bun—three slices of silicon stacked on top of each other, with a chemical coating in-between each slice. Of course, these are no ordinary burgers: each slice is about as thick as two strands of DNA.
The fragile silicon surface is covered with a protective layer and wiring is added so it can be attached to a circuit board. This fingernail-sized marvel is finally more or less finished, ready to become part of a smartphone. From Malaysia it is then shipped to the assembly plant in China. In these enormous, town-sized factories, most of them run by a company called Hon Hai Technology Group, better known as Foxconn, they are attached to logic boards alongside a dozen or more other chips from companies like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.
Few, even in the industry itself, understand the length and complexity of this journey, the number of processes involved, the quantity of companies playing a part. The media frequently writes about Apple, sometimes about Foxconn. Occasionally specialist outlets write about TSMC and maybe even ASML. They cite the centrality of Taiwan and the Netherlands to the semiconductor supply chain. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, for there are hundreds of other companies without whom these somewhat more prominent parts of the supply chain would be unable to function. What about Linton Crystal,
...more
TSMC’s fabs would not function without machine tools from the Netherlands and Japan, or chemicals from Germany and bits and pieces from a range of other nations. There is only a handful of companies capable of making perfect silicon wafers, and none is headquartered in either the U.S. or China. And there is only one site in the world capable of making the quartz sand for the crucibles where those wafers are crystallised.
And the deeper one delves, the clearer it is that each of these supply chains is interwoven with another. We are in a web, not a chain. There would be no silicon chips without the roaring coal-fuelled furnaces turning quartzite into metallurgical silicon. There would be no polysilicon without the hydrogen chloride we use to dissolve it and initiate the Siemens process. There would be no semiconductors without the chemicals and gases being pumped up into the cleanroom from the sub-fab level below it.
During the Second World War, as Nigeria faced shortages and the threat of famine, salt was used as a currency in many of the villages in the north, with British salt fetching the highest exchange rate.[2]
The Romans were among the first culture to provide formal salt rations to their soldiers—each one received an allowance, which is where the word “salary” comes from, though it might better be thought of as a form of health insurance than cash, since they were also paid in money. When we talk about someone “earning their salt” or being “worth his salt,” we are following an old Roman tradition.
During the American Civil War, the Union army intercepted shipments of food and salt to the south; it sought out saltworks and destroyed them, breaking brine pumps so that even if they were recaptured they would be useless. Even as it fought the Confederates it starved them too.
As recently as 2013 China’s “salt police”—a 25,000-strong force with its own special gold badge in the shape of salt crystals—was cracking down on private merchants who had been trying to sell salt online. This was ostensibly less about state control or revenues than about public health: China has had a spate of food contamination mishaps, and has been battling iodine deficiency among much of its rural population for years.
Civilisations from the Chinese to the British to the Ottoman Empire charged duties and taxes on the sale of salt, but none was quite as notorious as those in France. The gabelle, as the French salt tax was known, was costly, it was arbitrary—with some parts of the country facing eye-watering levies and others none—and it was universally hated. In some senses it was the prototype for the tax system as we know it today, analogous to the energy taxes that so squeeze households as they try to heat and power their homes. Small wonder that when the French Revolution came this tax on everyday life
...more
In an 1875 book called Das Salz, a German botanist, Matthias Jakob Schleiden, wrote that there was a clear relationship between salt taxes and despotism.
The history of salt making in India does not go back quite as far as that of China, but it is ancient all the same. For thousands of years Indians evaporated seawater along the coastline, as people did on the Adriatic or on the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean. But having occupied the country, the British came to change that. Colonies and territories were not merely viewed as places with rich natural resources to exploit, but, perhaps even more so, as captive markets for domestic goods. So the British banned the sale of local salt in Bengal and mandated that British salt be sold there.
...more
there are, broadly speaking, three ways to make salt. You can evaporate it from the sea, a painstaking process the Neolithic people in Boulby were carrying out at scale thousands of years ago. You can dig rock salt out from the ground, as happens in perhaps the oldest operational mine in the world: the Khewra salt mine in Pakistan, which is said to date back to the era of Alexander the Great. You’ve probably encountered Khewra salt before; it is better known these days as pink Himalayan salt, though the mine is actually about 200 miles from the Himalayan foothills, making this a cheeky bit of
...more
The third and final way to produce salt is to extract it from the ground in the form of brine—a saline solution that is more than 30 per cent salt, as opposed to the 3 per cent of seawater. This is called “solution mining” and in a sense it’s not so different from digging it out physically: you are still mining the same seam, only solution miners use remote hoses of pressurised water rather than drills and dynamite.
Much of America’s salt comes from underground in Kansas, Louisiana, Texas and New York state. Morton, one of the most famous producers, makes salt in Rittman, Ohio, and Silver Springs, New York, but as solution mines, they are essentially invisible. All there is to see at ground level are a few pipes, pumping down water and pressurised air, and pumping up salty brine.
The water from the brine is evaporated in enormous hot vessels, which leave the salt about the same consistency as wet sand. After a run through another oven, what emerges are glistening pure crystals of salt.
Caustic soda is another one of those substances no one spends all that much time pondering, but without which civilisation would cease to function. It is used in countless industrial processes, including in the manufacture of paper and aluminium, but perhaps most critically, it is what we use to make soap and detergents.
On the flipside, chlorine helps purify the water we drink. It also represents the chemical foundations for a whole suite of medicines—including sedatives like Librium, anti-depressants like Valium, antibiotics like vancomycin, used to kill the bacteria Staphylococcus, and anti-malarial drugs like chloroquine.
The availability of cheap soaps and sanitary items arguably helped increase life expectancy more than any other innovation over the past couple of centuries. And at the very heart of this revolution was salt.
As we stared at the tank where the chlorine is mixed with the caustic soda to create hypochlorite—the compound that goes into bleach and water purification systems—one worker whispered: “If this place goes down unexpectedly then within seven days this country is rationing drinking water.”
Consider the story of soda ash, that chemical used as a flux in glassmaking since the dawn of civilisation. This extraordinary alkali can help reduce the melting point of silica sand when added in a furnace. When mixed with oils and fats it can create soaps and it’s also instrumental in the production of paper. You will rarely go a day of your life without touching something that owes its existence to soda ash.
The chemicals revolution is perhaps the most-overlooked aspect of the industrial revolution, yet the development of chemical products arguably changed more lives than, for instance, the mass production of steel. It certainly saved more lives, purifying our water and cleansing our homes, saving us from bacteria and germs long before we understood the nature of their threats.
As you read this, the cells of a chloralkali plant somewhere not too far from you will be humming away, turning salty water into a cocktail of chemicals. Here is caustic soda, without which there would be no paper—since we use the corrosive chemical to pulp wood into fibre. Here is hydrogen chloride, without which there would be no solar panels or silicon chips (remember the part it plays in the Siemens process). Here is chlorine to purify our water…If much of what makes us human is our determination to turn one substance into another, then salt is among our most important tools. Somewhere
...more
The vast majority of that is turned into steel, which, despite its name, is simply one of many varieties of iron. The clue here is the carbon content. At one end of the spectrum is cast iron or pig iron (so named because when it was first made it would set in a series of channels and moulds resembling a litter of piglets being nursed by their mother). This is a brittle metal with about 3–4 per cent carbon. At the other end is wrought iron, soft enough to be beaten with a hammer and very pure, with infinitesimally small quantities of carbon. In the middle is steel, which typically has less than
...more
China has produced more steel in the past decade than the United States has since the beginning of the twentieth century. China’s ascent to the pinnacle of steel production is much the same as its story elsewhere in the Material World: near-total dominance.
So the events in Azovstal caused an economic ripple that went far beyond Ukraine, or for that matter the steel industry; soon enough silicon-chip manufacturers in Taiwan, South Korea and even South Wales began to stockpile these gases for fear of a global shortage. So it goes in the Material World, where one obscure side product turns out to be essential for another seemingly unrelated supply chain on the other side of the planet.
But much like salt or for that matter glass, iron remains one of those materials whose production, archaic and industrial as it might often seem, turns out to provide the bedrock for the world as we know it. Steel may seem like a technology of the past, but it remains a thing of the present and a substance without which we cannot construct the future. Having said all of that, witnessing its production today nonetheless feels like a journey back in time, into the Middle Ages.
The ancient Hittites, who occupied the area now covered by Turkey and Syria, seem to have worked out how to smelt iron and create steel weapons around 1400 bc, and over the following years the skills spread throughout much of Asia and Europe, kickstarting what anthropologists like to call the Iron Age. But it wasn’t until the fifth century bc that the Chinese developed the first blast furnaces, and it wasn’t until the medieval period that they spread to Europe. There were furnaces producing pig iron in Sussex around 1500 and here in South Wales not long afterwards.
And since it was cheap that meant you could have steel wherever you wanted it: steel for ploughs, for engines, for the skeletons of buildings and, for that matter, the nails attaching them to each other. Here we run smack bang into the same lesson we learned from concrete: what makes steel a mainstay of the Material World? Not merely that it is very good at doing what it does, but that it is both very good and very cheap.
Hence, the only way of getting hold of low-background steel is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945. Old sunken battleships are a particularly popular source. Some of the steel from wreckages of German ships scuttled at Scapa Flow in the First World War is believed to have been removed and forged into medical equipment. And there is a roaring trade in metal piracy from old warships, especially in the South China Sea.[18]
