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

by Mark Miodownik

it’s the transparent protective layer of chromium oxide that makes the spoon tasteless, since your tongue never actually touches the metal and your saliva cannot react with it; it has meant that we are one of the first generations who have not had to taste our cutlery.

One of the great attractions of glass is that its shiny bright appearance makes it seem clean even if it isn’t, a collective deception we all accept in order to avoid thinking too much about using the same glass that was in a stranger’s mouth perhaps only an hour before.

THE FIRST TIME I went to art class, the teacher, a man called Barrington, told us that everything we could see was made of atoms. Everything. And that if we could understand that, we could begin to be artists. The room went quiet. He asked for questions, but all of us were struck dumb, wondering if we were in the right class. He continued his introduction to art by holding up his pencil and proceeding to draw a perfect circle on the piece of paper he had taped to the wall. There was general excitement and sighs of relief from the assembled pupils. Perhaps we were in an art class after all. “I’ve transferred atoms from the pencil to the paper,” he observed. He then gave us a speech about the wonders of graphite as a material for artistic expression. “It is important to note,” he said, “that although diamond is culturally revered as the superior form of carbon, it is in fact incapable of deep expression, and unlike graphite no good art can come from diamond.” What he subsequently thought of Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, valued at £50 million, I can only guess.

Large diamond gemstones have no use except to arouse wonder and awe and, most importantly, to affirm status. Before the twentieth century only the truly rich could afford them. But the growing wealth of the European middle classes provided a tempting new market for diamond miners. The problem faced by the company DeBeers, which in 1902 controlled 90 percent of the world’s diamond production, was how to sell to this much bigger market without devaluing the gems in the process. They managed it through a cunning marketing campaign: by concocting the phrase “Diamonds are forever,” they invented the idea of the diamond engagement ring as the only true way to express everlasting love. Anyone who wished to convince their lover of the truth of their feelings needed to buy one, and the more expensive the diamond, the truer the feelings expressed. The marketing campaign took off spectacularly, catapulting a diamond into millions of households and culminating in a James Bond movie, accompanied by a Shirley Bassey / John Barry song, that enshrined the new social role of the diamond as the embodiment of romantic love.

At this time Europeans were still drinking from wood, pewter, silver, or earthenware. Porcelain was physical evidence of just how much more technically advanced the Chinese were than anyone else in the world. To have a set of porcelain tea cups and to serve the best China tea immediately set you apart.

IN THIS BOOK I have delved into our material world in an attempt to show that although the materials around us might seem like blobs of differently colored matter, they are in fact much more than that: they are complex expressions of human needs and desires.