Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

by Mark Miodownik

Any engineer guessing the outcome of Joseph’s experiments might have assumed that concrete and steel, being so different, would expand and contract at such different rates that they would tear each other apart; that in the heat of the summer or in the depths of winter in Joseph’s garden, the steel would break out of the concrete, causing the pots to rupture. Perhaps this is why it took a gardener to try the experiment at all—it just seems so obvious that it would not work. But, as luck would have it, steel and concrete have almost identical coefficients of expansion. In other words, they expand and contract at almost the same rate. This is a minor miracle, and Joseph was not the only one to notice it. An Englishman, William Wilkinson, had also happened upon this magic combination of materials. Reinforced concrete’s time had come.