Outline: Making the Modern World

An outline of Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization, by Vaclav Smil, Chapters 2 & 3.

Chapter 1 is an introduction where he discusses methodology: what he is including in his survey and why. Chapters 2 gives the history of materials, and Chapter 3 a survey of material use today. Those are the most important for my purposes.

Chapter 2: How We Got Here

2.1 Materials Used by Organisms

Skipping this as it is not relevant to my study.

2.2 Materials in Prehistory

• Stone tools (adzes, axes, hammers, awls, arrows, tips, knives)
• Wood tools (bows & arrows, etc.)
• Other plant-based materials such as woven fishing nets
• Temporary shelters
• Quicklime, dating to 9600 BC (“Kilning limestone was thus the first successful industrial process dependent on a chemical reaction”)
• Fired pottery
• Megalithic (stone) structures (Göbekli Tepe, Stonehenge)
• Textiles: animal skins, linen, wool; bone sewing needles

2.3 Ancient and Medieval Materials

• Metals
  • “Initially only copper and tin on limited scales”, later “zinc, lead, iron, mercury, silver, and gold”
  • “Iron became the dominant metal after roughly 1200 BCE”
• Wood
  • First “small trunks, tree branches, and bushes”
  • Tools and carpentry led to “the first massive log houses made of shaped and joined timbers”
  • “Hulls and masts of ocean-going vessels”
  • Wooden barrels
• Stone
  • Used for infrastructure, funerary, religious structures
  • Medieval architecture created tall stone cathedrals
• Clay
  • Bricks, tiles for construction
  • Also jars
• Mortars
  • Quicklime and now slaked lime (the Romans actually used lime mortar, not cement)
• Glass
  • Dating from 5kya but “became an important material only during the Middle Ages”
  • “Crown glass production was the only practical way to produce panes of limited sizes until the mid-nineteenth century”
  • “Glass was too expensive for the glazing of ordinary homes, and glass windows became common only during the early modern era”
• Returning to metal:
  • Copper
    • Dates from 10kya w/o smelting; smelting & casting from 6kya
    • Copper is soft with low tensile strength; “the much stronger and harder bronze became the first practical alloy in history”
  • Other ancient metals “included zinc, lead, mercury, silver, and gold”
  • Iron:
    • “The first iron artifacts date to around 5000 BCE, but the metal came into common use only less than 3000 years ago”
    • “The greater abundance of iron ores and slow advances in smelting the metal eventually made iron the most important metal of antiquity”
    • “In aggregate mass terms, it has kept its dominance … with the total consumption of other metals adding up to a small fraction of iron use”
    • “Steel remained expensive and hence in limited use until the nineteenth century”

2.4 Materials in the Early Modern Era

• “In material terms the era was characterized by some new qualities but even more so by much increased quantities”

2.5 Creating Modern Material Civilization

• “In material terms modernization – driven by industrialization and urbanization – was marked, above all, by two processes: a greatly expanded extraction of traditional construction materials, and a rapidly increasing consumption of metals”
• Glass:
  • 1848: Bessemer patents a method of producing of flat glass (a solution superior to crown glass and cylinder glass)
  • Mid-1950s: Pilkington introduces a molten tin bath method that allows production of very large pieces of near-perfect uniformity
• Cement:
  • 1824: Aspdin patents a hydraulic mortar/stucco cement that produces good-quality concrete
  • Reinforced concrete: a gradual process from 1860s through 1890s; modern rebar patented in 1884; first concrete skyscraper in 1891 (Chicago’s Monadnock Building)
  • 1890s: “the introduction of modern rotary kilns made it possible to produce low-cost, high-quality cement”
  • “All the prerequisites of the concrete era were thus in place before 1900”
• Metals:
  • Iron & steel:
    • “Improvements in iron smelting reduced the energy requirements of pig iron from almost 300 GJ/t in 1800 to only about 50 GJ/t by 1900 and made the metal much cheaper”
    • “But the best choice to meet all those high-tension demands was steel… steel is the strongest and the hardest of all common metals”
    • “In the antebellum USA only about 1% of the US pig iron was converted to steel, by 1900 the share was almost 75%, and by 1906 the conversion became virtually total”
  • Copper was used for plumbing and electrical wires
  • Aluminum: practical smelting process (using electricty) discovered in 1886; “The Hall–Héroult process still remains the only way to produce large quantities of the metal”
• Paper
  • “Its large-scale production was revolutionized at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the introduction of a continuous paper-making machine“
• Textiles
  • “The nineteenth-century revolution was mostly quantitative”; mechanized weaving based on power loom + steam engine
• Gases
  • Thomson–Joule effect leads to extraction of gases from the atmosphere

2.6 Materials in the Twentieth Century

• Straw and other crop residues used to be indispensable; went away in the 20th century
• Wood
  • Per-capita consumption has declined but aggregate demand has risen
  • Wood retained & expanded all its original markets except shipbuilding
• Concrete
  • Now “the world’s most common building material”
• Glass
  • Advances in the size of glass produced and its purity
  • “By 1900 the best optical glass was about 10,000 times more transparent than the earliest glass produced in Egypt some 5000 years ago, and after 1970 the use of high-purity SiO2 had improved that transparency by four more orders of magnitude, making it possible to use optical fibers” for communication
• Metal
  • Steel
    • “Steel’s dominance of the global metal market greatly increased during the twentieth century thanks to nearly continuous advances in iron smelting and steelmaking”
    • Major uses included cards and construction
  • Aluminum
    • Used by transportation industry, especially airplanes
  • Copper, ranked 3rd among twentieth century metals
    • 5 major markets: construction; industrial machinery; transportation machinery; industrial electrical and electronic products; consumer products
  • Zinc, lead are 4th and 5th
• Silicon
  • Used for electronics
  • Makes up 28% of Earth’s crust (!)
• Plastics
  • “The quintessential twentieth century material, with a particularly rapid post-World War II diffusion as they replaced wood, metals, and glass in many household, industrial, and transportation products”
  • 1907: Bakelite invented, first thermoset plastic
  • 1912: cellophane
  • 1930s: “The still unsurpassed era of major plastic discoveries as a result of systematic institutionalized research by large chemical firms”: DuPont, IG Farben, Imperial Chemical Industries
  • 1935: Plexiglas
  • 1937: Nylon
  • 1938: Teflon
  • In 2010, plastic production was 18% of steel by mass but greater than steel by volume
• Fertilizer
  • Haber-Bosch process to synthesize ammonia

Chapter 3: What Matters Most

3.1 Biomaterials

• Summary in order of dominance:
  • Wood
  • Crop residues, especially cereal straws
  • Fiber crops, mostly cotton lint
  • Natural rubber
  • Animal hides/skins
• “Consumption of many of these biomaterials has been in long-term decline,“ but “demand for the three biomaterial leaders – lumber, paper made from wood pulp, and cotton clothes – will remain strong”
• “The only major wood-based industry that has seen significant post-1950 changes and inroads made by substitutes is furniture-making”
• “Substitutions by concrete, metals, and plastics have greatly reduced wood intensities of modern societies, but wood remains an important structural material and its annual production surpasses the combined output of all metals and plastics”
• Paper: “one of the signature materials of the modern world”

3.2 Construction Materials

Mostly clay and concrete

3.3 Metals

• Steel
• Alumnium

3.4 Plastics

• Thermoplastics “account for nearly 80% of the total”
  • Polyethylene (PE) is by far the most important thermoplastic (29% of the world’s output in 2010)
  • Polypropylene (PP) comes next (with about 19%)
  • Polyvinyl chloride (PVC, about 12%)
• Thermosets are most of the rest
  • “Dominated by polyurethanes and epoxy resins”
  • “Followed by polyimides, melamines, and urea-formaldehyde”

3.5 Industrial Gases

• Ammonia synthesis is leading use of nitrogen
• Liquid nitrogen: used for freezing
• Oxygen: used in smelting and many other purposes
• Argon: in lighting
• Hydrogen
• Nitrous oxide
• Carbon dioxide

3.6 Fertilizers

• Again, Haber-Bosch used to synthesize ammonia
• Phosphorus
• Potassium
• Synthetic pesticides and herbicides

3.7 Materials in Electronics

• Silicon
  • Abundant in the Earth’s crust as silicon oxide; needs refining into pure Si
  • Metallurgical-grade silicon can be 99% pure
  • Solar cells need 6–8 nines
  • Microchips need 9-11 nines (!)