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

by Mark Miodownik

Radivoke Lajic, who lives in northern Bosnia, is a man who knows all about strange bits of metal falling from the sky. Between 2007 and 2008 his house was hit by no fewer than five meteorites, which is statistically so hugely unlikely that his claim that aliens were targeting him seems almost reasonable. Since Lajic went public with his suspicions in 2008, his house has been hit by another meteorite.

A piece of this desert glass forms the centerpiece of a decorative scarab found on the mummified body of Tutankhamun. We know that this desert glass was not made by the ancient Egyptians because it has recently been established that it is twenty-six million years old. The only glass we know like it is Trinitite glass, the glass formed at the site of the Trinity nuclear bomb test in 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico. Given that there was no nuclear bomb in the Libyan Desert twenty-six million years ago, the current theory is that the extremely high temperatures that would have been needed to create such optically pure glass must have been produced by the high-energy impact of a meteor.

they invented the glass window (the word means “wind eye”). Before the Romans, windows were open to the wind, and although these might have wooden shutters or cloth curtains to keep out excessive wind and rain, the idea that a transparent material might be able to provide complete protection was revolutionary.

Mostly, they were dark brown and murky brews. Then in 1840 in Bohemia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, a method to mass-produce glass was developed, and it became cheap enough to serve beer to everyone in glasses. As a result people could see for the first time what their beer looked like, and they often did not like what they saw: the so-called top-fermented brews were variable not just in their taste, but in their color and clarity too. Not ten years later, a new beer was developed in Pilsen using bottom-fermenting yeast. It was lighter in color, it was clear and golden, it had bubbles like champagne—it was lager.

It is often said that there are very few places left on Earth that have yet to be discovered. But those who say this are usually referring to the places that exist at the human scale.

Take a look at the graphite of a pencil and you will see that it is dark gray and shiny like a metal. For thousands of years it was mistaken for lead and was referred to as “plumbago,” or “black lead,” hence the use of the term “lead” to refer to the graphite used in a pencil.

The dynasties showed off their ceramics by creating incredibly beautiful vases and ceremonial bowls with which they decorated their palaces. But they realized that for their honored guests to really marvel at the translucency and lightness of this new material they needed to feel it as well as see it. 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, a nineteenth-century Turkish innovation.

Until this material innovation, a broken leg often resulted in permanent lameness.

The invention in 1840 of an alloy comprised mainly of silver, tin, and mercury, called amalgam, was the turning point. In its preliminary form, amalgam is a liquid metal at room temperature because of its mercury content. However, when it’s mixed with its other components, a reaction takes place between the mercury and the silver and tin that results in a new crystal, which is fully solid, hard-wearing, and tough.

On Earth, ninety-four different types of atoms naturally exist, but eight of these elements make up 98.8 percent of the mass of the Earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, and aluminum. The rest are technically trace elements, including carbon.