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

by Mark Miodownik

There are many stories of those who have laughed at visionaries only to be embarrassed by their subsequent success. Many laughed at the idea that heavier-than-air flying machines were possible, and yet we all fly around in them. Likewise, television, mobile phones, computers—all have emerged from a cloud of derision.

To prevent forgeries the paper has a number of tricks up its sleeve. First of all, it is not made of wood cellulose, like other paper, but from cotton.

Paper money is an endangered species. Money is mostly electronic these days, and only a small percentage of transactions are carried out in cash. These are mostly low-value transactions, and electronic cash is poised to replace these too.

newspaper will no longer sit underneath muddy boots, or lounge folded up on train station benches; it will no longer protect floors from paint drips, or be wrapped around precious objects to protect them; it will no longer be crumpled into a ball, to light a fire, or be thrown cheekily at an unsuspecting sibling. None of these uses of newspaper are essential in themselves, but taken as a whole they paint a picture of a very domestic, useful, and much loved material. A material that will be missed.

When concrete reinforced with steel comes under bending stresses, the inner skeleton of steel soaks up the stress and protects it from the formation of large cracks. It is two materials in one, and it transforms concrete from a specialist material to the most multipurpose building material of all time.

But our ugly secret, and that of the Shard, is that concrete is literally the foundation of our whole society: it is the basis of our cities, our roads, our bridges, our power stations—it is 50 percent of everything we make.

have eaten a raw cocoa bean and it tastes horrible: it is fibrous, woody, bitter, and bland; there is no fruitiness, no hint of a chocolate taste, and certainly no reason to taste one again. It takes quite a bit of engineering to turn these rather exotic-looking but dull-tasting beans into chocolate. So much so, in fact, that it gets you wondering how it was ever invented at all.

But what is much less talked about is that, just like coffee and tea, different varieties of bean and different techniques of preparation create vastly different tastes. A detailed understanding of both is required to buy the right beans, and when it comes to creating the finest chocolates this knowledge is closely guarded.

In the USA the milk used has had some of its fat removed by enzymes, giving the chocolate a cheesy, almost rancid flavor. In the UK sugar is added to liquid milk, and it is this solution, reduced to a concentrate, that is added to the chocolate, creating a milder caramel flavor. In Europe powdered milk is still used, giving the chocolate a fresh dairy flavor with a powdery texture. These different tastes do not travel well.

The other psychoactive ingredient is theobromine, which is a stimulant and antioxidant, like caffeine, but is also highly toxic to dogs. Many dogs die every year from eating chocolate, mainly around Easter and Christmas. Theobromine’s effect on humans appears to be much milder, and the stimulant levels in chocolate are small when compared to coffee and tea, so even if you eat a dozen chocolate bars every day, it is only equivalent to drinking one or two cups of strong coffee.

Hyatt was also financially backed by a syndicate of investors led by Marshal Lefferts, a retired Civil War general. There were complaints about Hyatt’s exploding collodion-covered balls from saloon owners, one of whom reported that “every time the balls collided, every man in the room pulled a gun.” These days pool and snooker balls are made from a plastic called phenolic resin, and celluloid is only used for making one type of ball: the table tennis ball.

Nylon’s sleekness took on the fashion industry, replaced silk as the material for women’s stockings, and then spawned a new family of fabrics, such as Lycra and PVC, as well as a group of materials called elastomers, without which all our clothes would be baggy and our pants would fall down. Vinyl changed music, how we recorded it and how we listened to it, and along the way it created rock stars. And silicone—well, silicone turned imagination into reality by creating a plastic form of surgery. Without plastics, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—and all other movies—would never have existed; neither would the cinema matinee, nor the cinema itself, and our visual culture would be very different indeed. So although I am no fan of excessive plastic packaging, I hope I’ve shown that, if there is one place a plastic candy wrapper should feel safe and appreciated, it is most definitely in a cinema. FIN.

because the two most abundant chemical elements in the Earth’s crust are oxygen and silicon, which react together to form silicon dioxide molecules (SiO2). A quartz crystal is just a regular arrangement of these SiO2 molecules, in the same way that an ice crystal is a regular arrangement of H2O molecules or iron is a regular arrangement of iron atoms.

Until this time, drinking vessels had been opaque, made of metal, horn, or ceramic. The appreciation of wine was based solely on the way it tasted. The invention of drinking glasses meant that the color, transparency, and clarity of wine became important, too. We are used to seeing what we drink, but this was new to the Romans, and they loved it.

Chemists were also able to bend glass tubes within the laboratory with the aid of only a blowtorch and to construct complex chemical equipment such as distillation vessels and gas-tight containers much more easily. Gases could be collected, liquids controlled, chemical reactions allowed to do whatever they liked. Glass equipment is the workhorse of the chemist’s world—so much so that every professional chemical lab has a glass blower in residence. How many Nobel Prizes did this material make possible? How many modern inventions started life in a test tube?

The biggest diamond yet discovered is located in the Milky Way in the constellation of Serpens Cauda, where it is orbiting a pulsar star called PSR J1719–1438. It is an entire planet five times the size of Earth.

all diamonds, including the Great Star of Africa in the Tower of London, are actually turning slowly into graphite. This is distressing news for anyone who owns a diamond, although they can be reassured that it will take billions of years before they see an appreciable degradation of their gems.

All forms of life on Earth are based on carbon, and although these types of carbon appear very different from graphite, they can easily be converted into its hexagonal structure through burning: wood turns into charcoal when heated; bread becomes burnt toast; we too become black and charred when exposed to a fire. None of these processes produce pure shiny graphite, since the hexagonal layers of carbon are not densely packed but are jumbled up. But there is a vast spectrum of black sooty materials, which all have one thing in common: they contain carbon in its most stable form—hexagonal sheets.

What began as a source of pride for the Han Dynasty soon became a matter of identity, embodying their prowess. From that moment on in Chinese history, different royal dynasties were associated with different types of imperial porcelain.

Tea drinking provided a perfect way to do so. Serving tea to one’s guests in porcelain cups became an expression not just of technical sophistication but of cultural refinement as it grew eventually into a ceremonial ritual.

plaster cast is stiff and strong enough to take the weight of a person and to withstand the knocks that occur when walking about on crutches, while allowing a perfect recovery. Until this material innovation, a broken leg often resulted in permanent lameness.

The upshot of this is that although it will become increasingly effective to grow and replace body parts, the interconnections between these different organs and the thousands of different systems on which our bodies depend will continue to accrue defects that impair performance. We will still get old.

The early archaeological evidence shows that as soon as we developed tools we also started creating decorative jewelry, pigments, art, and clothing. These materials were developed for aesthetic and cultural reasons, and this has been a strong driver of materials technology throughout history.