Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

The economist John Maynard Keynes once called gold a “barbarous relic.” His point was that while it might look pretty on a necklace or inside a sarcophagus it doesn’t really do all that much. Clearly it has value—why else would we blow up entire mountains for a few bars of it?

But think, for a moment, about what gold actually does. It plays an important if somewhat fringe role in electronics and chemistry, but that accounts for less than a tenth of demand these days. Instead, its primary uses are in jewellery, decoration and as an asset

for those who worry about econom...

glance at the balance sheets of our economies, which show that, for instance, four out of every five dollars generated in the U.S. can be traced back to the services sector and an ever vanishing fraction is attributed to energy, mining and manufacturing.

questions. It is all very well knowing the price of something, but price is not the same thing as importance.

Between being blasted out of the ground in

a quarry and ending up inside a smartphone, this grain of silicon will have circumnavigated the world numerous times. It will have been heated to more than 1,000°C and then cooled, not once or twice but three times. It will have been transformed from an amorphous mass into one of the purest crystalline structures in the universe.

will have been zapped with lasers powered by a form of light that you can’t see and doesn’t survive exposure to the atmosphere. This—the process of turning silicon into a tiny silicon chip—w...

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.

My hunch is that this partly comes back to data—or lack of it. We are very good at counting dollars ...

Yet because it increasingly happens out of sight and doesn’t show up in conventional economic data, we are getting ever better at convincing ourselves it’s not happening.

This book about the Material World is told through six materials: sand, salt,

iron, copper, oil and lithium.

Having spent most of my life cosseted in the ethereal world, blissfully ignorant about how we make and get things, I began to look out with fresh eyes. My hope is that this book inspires you to take a second look at the world we inhabit, where there is magic in everyday objects and wonder in simple substances.

Up until the nineteenth century Britain was widely considered to be the world’s foremost manufacturer of quality glass, with