Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

What about Linton Crystal, which makes the furnaces for the Czochralski process and the diamond saws that slice up the boules? What about JSR, one of the world leaders in photoresist technology? What about EV Group and IMS Nanofabrication, which dominate wafer bonding and mask production and are both based in Austria? What about all the other firms providing critical machinery for the fabs, which read like a list of mysterious names and acronyms: Veeco, Tokyo Electron, Lam Research, ASM Pacific, Applied Materials and Edwards…? Remove one or two of these companies and, well: no more computers or smartphones.

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. When politicians talk lazily about re-shoring, it often betrays a deep ignorance of what is happening out there in the Material World.

It is hard to think of many other wars with a more consequential result than this. Chile won control of some of the most important mineral resources in the world—not just the nitrates of the Atacama, but the world’s biggest reserves of copper and lithium. This conflict turned the country into a resources superpower, depriving Bolivia of its coastline in the process. In the following years Chilean nitrates helped feed and arm the world. It was Chilean nitrates in the Allied explosives that rained down on the trenches in the First World War. Their revenues helped finance the construction of more roads and railroads, electrical networks and plumbing, and helped Chile build an advanced military and attain the twentieth-century trappings enjoyed by many European countries. Thanks to this white salt, Chile became the richest nation in Latin America.

The Haber–Bosch process, as it has become known, is one of the most important scientific and industrial discoveries in history. It has, in the subsequent century, helped us to feed billions of people. One of the greatest triumphs of humankind during the twentieth century was banishing hunger and famine as a widespread issue. The share of undernourished people around the world fell from around 65 per cent in 1950 to under 10 per cent by 2010—in large part because of the increased crop yields brought about by cheap, widespread fertilisers. They are so widely used today that it is estimated that around half of the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed from the air via the Haber–Bosch process.

This was neither the first nor the last time a country would import knowledge and equipment from overseas in an effort to build out its industrial base. People have been doing this forever: George Ravenscroft would never have worked out how to make clear, crystal glass without help from the artisans he had smuggled back from Venice. In the late nineteenth century Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie would import the Bessemer convertor into the U.S., helping cement his dominant position in the sector. Eyebrows were raised in the early 2000s when a Chinese firm bought a ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Dortmund and transported it brick by brick to a site on the lower Yangtze River. But the Chinese were merely doing what the Russians, Americans and indeed most countries had done since humans first discovered how to make iron: importing knowhow and then building an empire on top of it.