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

by Mark Miodownik

Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibitions also testify to the cultural influence of new biomaterials, inviting us to contemplate our physicality in both life and death.

Dislocations are what make metals so special as materials for tools, cutting edges, and ultimately the razor blade, because they allow the metal crystals to change shape.

The melting point of a metal is an indicator of how tightly the metal atoms are stuck together and so also affects how easily the dislocations move. Lead has a low melting point and so dislocations move

Alloys tend to be stronger than pure metals for one very simple reason: the alloy atoms have a different size and chemistry from the host metal’s atoms, so when they sit inside the host crystal they cause all sorts of mechanical and electrical disturbances that add up to one crucial thing: they make it more difficult for dislocations to move. And if dislocations find it difficult to move, then the metal is stronger, since it’s harder for the metal crystals to change shape. Alloy design is thus the art of preventing the movement of dislocations.

The mystique that surrounded steelmaking engendered various myths, and the unification and restoration of order to Britain in the wake of the Roman retreat was symbolized by one of the most enduring of these: Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur, sometimes attributed with magical powers and associated with the rightful sovereignty of Britain. At a time when swords regularly snapped in battle, leaving a knight defenseless, it is easy to see why a high-quality steel sword wielded by a strong warrior came to represent the rule of civilization over chaos. The fact that the process of making steel was, necessarily, highly ritualized also helps to explain why this material came to be associated

with magic.

I assumed he meant Hephaistos, the Greek god of metals, fire, and volcanoes, whose classical image is that of a smith at a forge. Physically

is a philosophy as much as it is an engineering technique, completing a cycle that starts when the Earth’s mantle creates rock and stone through mountain building, which is then mined by humans and transformed back into our own artificial mountains of rock, made to our own design, where we live and work.

the Maillard reaction. This is when a sugar reacts with a protein. If carbohydrates are the fuel of the cellular world, proteins are the workhorses: the structural molecules that build cells and all their internal workings.

It is no exaggeration to say that without the Maillard reaction the world would be a much less delicious place: it is the Maillard reaction that is responsible for the flavor of bread crust, roasted vegetables, and many other roasted, savory flavors. In this case, the Maillard reaction is responsible for the nutty, meaty flavors of chocolate, while also reducing some of the astringency and bitterness.

This Raleigh scattering, as it is called, is very slight indeed, so you need an enormous volume of gas molecules to see it: the sky works but a room full of air doesn’t. Put another way, any one bit of the sky doesn’t look blue but the whole atmosphere does.

In 1931, the year Kistler reported his invention of aerogels, the physicist Ernst Ruska created the first electron microscope.

During the nineteenth century the game got more technically sophisticated. First the cue sticks became tipped with leather and covered in chalk, to allow greater control of the ball by using spin. This technique was introduced to America by English sailors and is still referred to as putting “English” on the ball.

Nitroglycerin is made by nitrating glycerol, which is an oily colorless liquid that results from soap manufacture. You just mix the glycerol with nitric acid. But, as you say, it is very unstable and is the key ingredient in dynamite. What I have here, however, is nitrocellulose, which is made by mixing wood pulp with nitric acid. If you dry it out it becomes something called gun cotton, which is highly flammable, I grant you, but (turning again to LEFFERTS) doesn’t really explode. In the liquid form I am using, known as collodion, it does something rather interesting. Watch.

John Wesley Hyatt and his brother set up a lab in their shed to do just this, inspired in part by an advertisement in the New York Times that offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. 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.

when formaldehyde was discovered by the German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann.

These days, a new technique called plastinization has been developed by Gunther von Hagens. This involves the removal of water and fat (such as lipids) from the body, and their replacement, using a vacuum technique, with silicone rubber and epoxy resin, a hugely versatile material that is used in all sorts of paints and adhesives and flexible products. Like formaldehyde, this produces a lifelike appearance, but because of the stiffness of the plastics used, the bodies can be set into lifelike poses. An exhibition of these preserved and posed bodies, Body Worlds, has been touring the world since 1995 and has been seen by millions.

celluloid is widely recognized as being the first commercial moldable plastic.

Pyrex is a glass with boron oxide added to the mix. This is another molecule that, like silicon dioxide, finds it hard to form crystals. More importantly, as an additive it counteracts the tendency of glass to expand when heated or contract when cooled.

“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.”

Diamonds on Earth are minuscule by comparison. The biggest yet found is the size of a football. Extracted from the Cullinan mine in South Africa, it was eventually presented to King Edward VII in 1907 on his birthday and is now part of the crown jewels of the British monarchy.

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.

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.

Yorkshire town of Whitby, where Bram Stoker later wrote his Gothic masterpiece Dracula,

experiment. He heated diamond in a vacuum so that there, with no air to react with the diamond, it might survive to higher temperatures. It’s one of those experiments that is easy to propose but much harder to carry out, especially in the eighteenth century, when vacuums themselves were not so easy to produce. What happened next astounded Lavoisier: the diamond still wasn’t impervious to red heat, but this time it turned into pure graphite—proof that these two materials were indeed made of the same stuff, carbon.

Indeed, one of the fastest aircraft in the Second World War was a wooden airplane called the Mosquito.

Carbon nanotubes are like miniature carbon fibers except that they have no weak van der Waals bonding. They were found to have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any material on the planet, which meant that they might be strong enough to build a space elevator.

Just for starters, graphene is the thinnest, strongest, and stiffest material in the world; it conducts heat faster than any other known material; it can carry more electricity, faster and with less resistance, than any other material; it allows Klein tunneling, an exotic quantum effect in which electrons within the material can tunnel through barriers as if they were not there.

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.

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Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art and History, MIT Press (1981). Arthur Street and William Alexander, Metals in the Service of Man, Penguin (1999).