Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

pretty much everything from social networks to retail to financial services is wholly reliant upon the physical infrastructure that facilitates it and the energy that powers

The first is how little we understand about how everyday products are actually made. The second is that, given all this complexity, no single human being could carry out, or for that matter direct, these numerous processes.

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. It 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.

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

Except that saying it’s everywhere is to miss the point, for there are many different types of sand, each with their own unique characteristics. While most sands are primarily silica, some, especially the beautiful white ones on tropical beaches, are composed mainly of something else: the ground-down remains of seashells and corals.

The internet is mostly a mesh of information transmitted through glass wires and, as you’ll see later on in this section, without glass we would be unable to make the brains of the most advanced computers.

Why was Germany prepared to provide Britain with technology that could be used to kill Germans? The main answer, it turns out, was that they desperately needed something in return: rubber. Not only were Britain and its allies—or rather its colonies—among the world’s biggest rubber producers, they had successfully blockaded German imports, starving the country of natural resources of rubber latex, an essential ingredient in tyres, tubing and fan belts in engines.

Wildly ironic!

For, save for the final few yards—between you and your router or between your home and the local exchange—pretty much every mile travelled by data online occurs as beams of light on strands of glass.

To put it another way, the reason cement has changed the world is not merely because it has magical qualities but because it is cheap and it is everywhere.

The Pantheon may have lasted more than 2,000 years, but the quality of some newly constructed concrete housing in China is so poor that it has an average lifespan of about 20 years.

Wow

A lone, rogue atom in an otherwise pure silicon matrix is enough to disrupt the flow of electrons in a transistor.

It is rare, unheard of almost, for a single site to control the global supply of a crucial material. Yet if you want to get high-purity quartz—the kind you need to make those crucibles without which you can’t make silicon wafers—it has to come from Spruce Pine, a small town on the Blue Ridge escarpment in North Carolina. For a long time, this mine—and by extension the entire global supply of high-purity quartz—was operated by a single company, a secretive Belgian business called Sibelco.

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.

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.

But while iron ore is relatively easy to come by, some of these exotic additives are not. Around 70 per cent of the world’s niobium—a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets, and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers—comes from a single mine in Brazil.

“We’ve got more technology out here than NASA,” Laura Baker, head of product management and development at the mill in Port Talbot, told me. “We’re running stuff through the mill at 1,000 metres a minute. We’re controlling the thickness to within 0.05 millimetres while running at those speeds. We can make thinner steels than ever before. This is a form of nanotechnology.”

Look up! PM across disciplines

If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation’s nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without. Its story is about extraordinary transformations in our standard of living, but also about something else: how humanity will go to extraordinary depths—quite literally—to find this metal and remove it from the ground.

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. He engineered his lightbulbs so they’d work with thinner copper wires and designed his electrical network in New York so it wouldn’t need the thick copper trunk wires he’d initially planned.

The average car already contains about a mile of copper wire connecting the sensors and electrical components that help it function. In electric cars we need three or four times the amount of copper, with about half of that going into the motors and the rest into the wiring harness and battery. A battery-powered bus will require nearly half a tonne of copper in motors and circuitry and large slabs—busbars as they’re called—capable of carrying even more current than conventional wires. High-speed trains will need even more.[22]

If steel is the skeleton of the modern world and copper its veins, then oil is the food that sustains us.

petroleum seemed initially to be a solution rather than a problem. It helped save the sperm whale from potential extinction by providing a superior lamp fuel to substitute for whale oil. The motor car replaced horse-drawn carriages just as commentators were panicking that their cities would soon become engulfed in horse manure. So it goes in the Material World.

Every six seconds we make enough of it in Europe to wrap the Eiffel Tower from head to toe. Every six seconds!

We barely understand the processes that have deposited this rich lithium brine under the surface of this salt lake yet here we are sucking it up and sending it off to refineries as quickly as we can. But if not from here, then where?