Events

Historical events and periods defined or shaped by materials.

• Bronze Age

  The period defined by bronze as the principal material for tools and weapons, roughly 3300–1200 BCE in the Near East.

• Copper Age

  The few thousand years when metal existed and was not yet better than stone.

• Industrial Revolution

  Coal, iron and steam, in that order — and the point at which material production stopped being limited by how much wood a country had.

• Iron Age

  The period in which ironworking displaced bronze as the principal metal technology.

• Stone Age

  Almost the whole of human history, named for the material that survives — which is exactly the problem with the name.

• The Montreal Protocol

  A class of materials identified as harmful and removed from world production by treaty — and the only environmental agreement that has plainly worked.

• The semiconductor era

  A material purified further than anything else made, and an industry that reorganised the world economy around it.

• The wartime materials programmes

  Synthetic rubber, aluminium, uranium and penicillin, built at national scale in about three years — and the clearest demonstration that material supply is a strategic question.