Seven Elements That Have Changed The World
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Seven Elements That Have Changed The World
'Fascinating and enjoyable ... enthused with insight' - Brian Cox Uranium, carbon, iron, titanium, gold, silver and silicon - former BP CEO John Browne explains how seven elements are shaping the 21st century, for good and for bad. Humans have put the Earth's resources to extraordinary use, but not always for the benefit of humankind. SEVEN ELEMENTS vividly describes how iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium and silicon have shaped the world around us - for good and for bad. This book takes you on an adventure of human passion, ingenuity and discovery, but it is a journey that is far from over: we continue to find surprising new uses for each of these seven key elements. Discover how titanium pervades modern consumer society, how natural gas is transforming the global energy sector and how an innovative new form of carbon could be starting a technological revolution. SEVEN ELEMENTS is a unique mix of science, history and politics, interwoven with the author's extensive personal and professional experience.
Ten Materials That Shaped Our World
This book examines ten materials—flint, clay, iron, gold, glass, cement, rubber, polyethylene, aluminum, and silicon—explaining how they formed, how we discovered them, why they have the properties they do, and how they have transformed our lives. Since the dawn of the Stone Age, we have shaped materials to meet our needs and, in turn, those materials have shaped us. The fracturing of flint created sharp, curved surfaces that gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge. Molding clay and then baking it in the sun produced a means of recording the written word and exemplified human artistic imagination. As our ability to control heat improved, earthenware became stoneware and eventually porcelain, the most prized ceramic of all. Iron cast at high temperatures formed the components needed for steam engines, locomotives, and power looms—the tools of the Industrial Revolution. Gold has captivated humans for thousands of years and has recently found important uses in biology, medicine, and nanotechnology. Glass shaped into early and imperfect lenses not only revealed the microscopic world of cells and crystals, but also allowed us to discover stars and planets beyond those visible with the naked eye. Silicon revolutionized the computer, propelling us into the Information Age and with it our interconnected social networks, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence. Written by a materials scientist, this book explores not just why, but also how certain materials came to be so fundamental to human society. This enlightening study captivates anyone interested in learning more about the history of humankind, our ingenuity, and the materials that have shaped our world.
Material World
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations and fed our ingenuity and our greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grid, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood tometal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths ofthe deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates. Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.