Mark Miodownik’s keen interest in materials science began when he was stabbed in the back on a train platform in London as teenager. He saw the weapon at the police station and was bewildered that it could gracefully slice through 5 layers of cloth and then his epidermis and dermis. Since then, he has studied everyday materials that hide in plain sight. They not only comprise the modern world in which we live, but shape the culture and values we hold dear.

Humans have been using steel for about 10,000 years. Stones, bones, and wood were the principal tools until that point, but metal is more fluid and malleable. Metal becomes soft when heated and hardens when it is compressed. It can be hammered into different shapes and is almost endlessly reusable. It was fundamental to the success of the Industrial Revolution.

As long as it’s been around, it was only in the twentieth century that we began to understand steel better. Steel’s actually comprised of crystals. We don’t often think of metals in this way. When we hear crystal, we usually think of quartz or diamond—the larger, transparent minerals. But the crystals that make up metals like steel are microscopic and opaque. A stainless steel razor blade will contain billions of these. They form almost-perfect three-dimensional shapes. Bonds between the atoms maintain the structure and give steel its strength. When a person shaves, infinitesimal crystals are chipped away, disrupting the uniform pattern along the razor’s edge.

Believe it or not, plastic is organic, in the sense that its compounds are all carbon-based. Plastic has been the whipping boy for environmentalists around the world. To be sure, we could do better about extraneous plastic packaging and the like, but there are amazing things about the stuff, and without plastic in its manifold expressions, the world and its cultures would be radically different.

The development of plastics began in earnest during chemical engineering’s heyday in the nineteenth century. Entrepreneurs were looking for chemists and inventors who could develop new materials. Chemicals were inexpensive and there was little to no government oversight regulating their sale. Inventors would create their products at their home labs. Goodyear’s founder actually developed synthetic plastics while in prison.

It’s hard to imagine a world without plastic. Elastomers keep our athletic gear from falling off our body. Nylon revolutionized the fashion industry, providing an affordable alternative to silk. This change democratized women’s stockings and a number of other clothing items. Music would never be the same after vinyl, which allowed greater dissemination of and exposure to tunes and led to the rise of more than a few rock stars.

One of plastic’s greatest cultural impacts has been through celluloid, a plastic used for motion pictures. Without celluloid, Butch Cassidy would have been buried in the sands of time. But a man from a late-1800s Wild West cadre still retains deep cultural resonance—and brings to mind images of a young Paul Newman. Celluloid has immortalized bygone eras, people, and places.  

Even in the era of smartphones and tablets, paper remains a trusted medium. It’s surprisingly ubiquitous when you think about it. You find it in various forms from the moment you open your eyes each day until the moment you go to sleep: there are the posters on your wall, wallpaper, and toilet paper—without which we endure a moment of crisis. Stores give you receipts; concert venues give you a ticket; that book on your bedside table is full of paper.

It’s thoroughly embedded in our daily lives, which is probably why we take it for granted. For most of its 2,000-year history, it was a luxury item that only the wealthy could afford.

Paper seems smooth, but its surface is actually rough and varied. It’s the same with the earth: viewed from space, the earth appears a perfect sphere, but when you live on its surface, you are aware of how pocked and pimpled it is. Paper is like a tangled bale of hay, but we wouldn’t know it without a microscope.

Most paper began as a tree. It’s made of the cellulose in trees. Extracting cellulose involves separating it from the glue-like substance in wood known as lignin.  “Delignation” requires boiling wood in a chemical concoction. It takes some doing. It’s kind of like trying to get gum out of hair. When it’s boiled down to a soupy pulp, it’s brown in color and looks like watery noodles at a microscopic level. To make paper the sheeny, smooth stuff we are most familiar with means another round of chemicals.

People tend to trust things that are in print. It gives a sense of permanence and even lends an air of legitimacy. When you read a story in an actual newspaper, you’re likely to trust it—even if it’s false. A new website seems comparatively transient. The online medium is literally not as substantive. The newspaper is a beloved, but disappearing convention. With the transition to digital platforms come changes in our social habits. Reading the morning paper with cup of Joe, using old papers for kindling, wrapping gifts, or catching paint are mostly behind us.

And let’s not forget love letters. They are one of the best and most impactful that communication has to offer. Texts and emails are easy and gratifying for their speed, but there’s nothing like getting a letter from the beloved, seeing that person’s inimitable script, knowing that your lover has touched the very same paper you’re holding. You can read it over and over again. Paper affords this experience in a way that phone calls and SMS simply cannot.

Of course, this makes breakups particularly painful for the same reason. Fortunately, there is a ready remedy because paper is carbon-based: just find some matches.

Concrete is quite literally the foundation of the modern world, especially the city. Skyscrapers, roads, and bridges are made of the stuff. About half of what we humans make is concrete. The first wave of consistent usage was in the Greco-Roman era, but it fell out of vogue for some reason. We are currently nearing the end of a second wave. It’s foundational, but considered an ugly necessity by modern sensibilities. We cover it over with paint and more aesthetic materials. But who knows? Perhaps new technologies in concrete will catalyze a third wave of excitement over the material.

One of the most recent and exciting innovations in concrete is self-healing concrete. What catalyzed the investigation was the discovery of bacteria in extremely alkaline hot springs. These pools had a pH ranging from 9 to 11, and were long considered too hostile to support life. One species in particular caught the attention of scientists: B. pasteurii. It’s perfectly comfortable living in rocks and excretes the mineral calcite.

Biologists and engineers have collaborated to develop a concrete that can repair itself by adding B. pasteurii into concrete mixes along with a starchy compound that serves as a food source. These bacteria can remain dormant in hostile conditions (e.g., trapped inside cement), but in the event of a crack in the sidewalk, exposure to moisture will bring them out of their hibernation. As they eat the starches, they produce calcite (a component in concrete) which fills in the cracks. Calcite production increases geometrically as the unleashed bacteria multiply. This process of biological cementation restores concrete to 90 percent of its original strength.

Chocolate might be the most delicious material ever devised. It was originally created as a liquid drink that could compete with coffee and tea. But people naturally make hot chocolate simply by letting a chunk sit on their tongue. This is because cocoa butter’s melting point is just below body temperature.

Cocoa butter is a remarkable product, rivaling dairy butter and olive oil—and surpassing them both in some aspects. Because cocoa butter’s melting point is near body temperature, it is an ideal moisturizer. It’s used in high-end lotions and facials. It’s also a key ingredient in some soaps, candles, and polishes. And, unlike butter, whose base is milk, cocoa butter shelf life is impressive.

Harvard University has conducted a number of studies and concluded that people who eat dark chocolate regularly and in modest quantities tend to live longer. This remains an area of research, but the opinion that chocolate is categorically bad for you is no longer taken seriously. In many countries, militaries include dark chocolate as part of the ration: it’s a sweet caffeine energy boost that replenishes the fat lost in intense physical exertion. A more controversial thesis is that dark chocolate can even take the edge off of sexual frustration.

Dark chocolate is a wonder of human ingenuity, no less impressive than steel or concrete. We have managed to transform a nasty, bitter rainforest nut into a cool, solid, delicate substance that melts in the mouth and trips the brain’s pleasure centers like few things can. It is the materials science equivalent of poetry, beautiful and subtle.

There’s nothing like ceramic cups for teatime. Ceramics are durable in a way that plastic is not, elegant in a way that metal can’t compare, and far more sustainable than paper cups, whose wax covering prevents leaks but also decomposition.

Not only are ceramics more practical and more environmentally friendly, but it’s almost a faux pas to have a hot drink in anything else. The bias toward ceramics is part of a centuries-old social ritual that predates plastic and paper—even glass and metal.

Millennia ago, our ancestors collected the soft, oozing clay from river beds and found that when exposed to significant heat, it became rigid, stone-like, and maintained its assigned shape. Without pottery, large settlements and the concurrent Agricultural Revolution would have been impossible.

Ceramics differ from metals and plastics in melting points. Because its mineral composition is the same as that of stones and mountains, its melting point is extremely high. Its liquid form would be magma, which can’t be contained in any materials we humans possess. And even if we could, the result would be a very porous, sponge-looking igneous rock. Only when exposed to extreme heat and pressure for millions of years would you get a material comparable to the stuff of mountains.

So what makes ceramics ceramics? They are comprised of various combinations of minerals, like quartz, alumina, and rust in the case of terracotta. These crystals are eroded from mountainsides and form the gooey deposits in rivers. The crystals that comprise the minerals are loosely associated until exposed to heat. If the heat is intense enough, the water gaps between the crystals evaporate and the atoms that comprise the crystals begin to bounce back and forth and eventually bond with each other. As these billions of microscopic bridges form between the crystals, they form a unified, tightly-packed super crystal.

The Eastern Han Dynasty made significant improvements to their ceramics when they began to heat clay to temperatures in excess of 2300° F. They also started adding a white mineral called kaolin to a mineral mix of quartz and feldspar. What emerged from the flames was a material that was glossy, delicate and thin enough to be translucent, while also retaining remarkable durability and strength. We now know this material as porcelain.

Porcelain’s aesthetic became a mark of royalty and wealth. European and Middle-Eastern merchants sold cups and vases, and attempted to learn the process, but it was a secret that the Chinese went to great pains to guard. The magic formula was discovered in the 1700s by the Saxon alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger. The king of Saxony had Böttger thrown in jail, and his life and freedom depended on discovering the secret of Chinese “white gold,” as porcelain had come to be called. When he stumbled upon the mineral kaolin, he found that he could heat clay to over 2400° F, immediately submerge it in water, and it would not shatter from the thermal shock. What emerged was porcelain comparable to that of the Chinese. Böttger regained his life and freedom, and the king of Saxony amassed a gargantuan fortune. It would be another 50 years before the British discovered “fine bone China.”

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