Materials

Processed and manufactured materials, from those used essentially as found to those with no natural analogue at all.

• ABS

  Three monomers doing three jobs — the tough, opaque plastic of appliance housings, car interiors and the LEGO brick.

• Aggregate

  Sand, gravel and crushed rock — by mass the most extracted solid material on Earth, and the one nobody thinks about until it runs short.

• Air

  The mixture everything breathes and the feedstock of an industry — the source of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and the rarer noble gases.

• Amber

  Tree resin that has had long enough — millions of years of polymerisation and terpene loss — and the material that gave electricity its name.

• Aramid fibre

  Rigid rod molecules lined up along a fibre — five times the strength of steel by weight, and the material of body armour.

• Asbestos

  Naturally fibrous silicate minerals that will not burn — an almost ideal industrial material, and a carcinogen for exactly the reason it works.

• Asphalt concrete

  Stone held together with the bottom of the oil barrel — the surface of nearly every road, and the most recycled material there is by tonnage.

• Battery graphite

  The other half of every lithium-ion cell, twice as much of it by mass as the cathode, and almost entirely refined in one country.

• Beeswax

  Secreted by bees to build with — and used by people as a candle, a polish, a sealant, and the disposable pattern that every bronze casting began as.

• Bone

  Mineral crystals grown on a protein scaffold — stiff like a ceramic and tough like a polymer, which no engineered material manages at once.

• Bone china

  Half bone ash by weight — the strongest and most translucent of the domestic ceramics, and the one arrived at by accident while trying to copy something else.

• Borosilicate glass

  Glass with boron in it, which barely changes size when heated — the reason an oven dish does not shatter and a drinking glass does.

• Brick

  Fired clay in a size one hand can lift — the oldest manufactured building unit still in mass production.

• Butyl rubber

  The rubber that gas will not pass through — the inner tube, the tyre liner, and the seal on a pharmaceutical vial.

• Carbon fibre

  Filaments of near-pure carbon with extraordinary stiffness-to-weight, used in composites rather than alone.

• Carbon fibre composite

  Carbon fibre in a resin — stiffer than steel for its weight, and nothing like as strong as the fibre's own number suggests.

• Charcoal

  Wood with everything but the carbon driven out — the fuel that smelted every metal until coke, and the material that made gunpowder and drawing possible.

• Clay

  Fine-grained weathered rock that is plastic when wet and rock-hard when fired — the oldest manufactured material.

• Concrete

  Cement, aggregate and water — the most-used manufactured material on Earth, and a significant share of global carbon emissions.

• Cotton

  The seed hair of a shrub, and the most used natural fibre in the world — comfortable, thirsty in every sense, and historically inseparable from slavery.

• Crude oil

  A mixture, not a substance — and the feedstock behind almost every synthetic polymer, before it is anything to do with fuel.

• Dimension stone

  Rock quarried in blocks and cut to size — the building material with the longest continuous record of use.

• Earthenware

  The oldest fired ceramic and still porous when it comes out of the kiln — the flowerpot, the roof tile, and the pottery of most of human history.

• EPDM

  The weatherproof rubber — car door seals, flat roofs and hose for anything except oil, which destroys it.

• Epoxy resin

  Two liquids that become a solid by reacting with each other — the structural adhesive, and the matrix holding most composites together.

• Ferrite

  A magnetic ceramic that barely conducts — which is why it works at frequencies no metal can, and why most of the magnets in the world are made of it.

• Fused silica

  Glass made of nothing but silica — almost no thermal expansion, transparent into the ultraviolet, and difficult enough to make that it is used only where nothing else will do.

• Glass fibre

  Glass drawn thin enough to bend without breaking — and by far the most-used reinforcing fibre there is.

• Glass fibre composite

  Glass fibre in a resin — the boat hull, the wind turbine blade and the water tank, and the composite everything else is compared against on price.

• Glass-ceramic

  Glass made and then deliberately crystallised — a material that can be shaped like glass and then made to behave like a ceramic.

• Gypsum plaster

  Heat gypsum to drive off most of its water, add the water back, and it sets — and the water it holds is why a plasterboard wall resists fire.

• Indium tin oxide

  A coating that conducts electricity and lets light through — the reason a touchscreen can be looked at as well as touched.

• Ivory

  Tooth dentine, carveable in any direction and taking a polish like nothing else — the most legally restricted material there is, and for good reason.

• Jet

  Fossil driftwood compressed into the gem-quality end of lignite — light, warm, carveable, and the reason 'jet black' is a phrase.

• Leather

  Animal hide stabilised so it will not rot — one of the oldest manufactured materials, and where a great deal of the world's chromium ends up.

• Lime mortar

  Mortar that sets by reabsorbing the carbon dioxide driven out of the limestone it came from — softer than cement, and that is the point.

• Mineral wool

  Rock or slag spun into fibres like candy floss — insulation that does not burn, in a market where most of the alternatives do.

• Nacre

  Aragonite bricks in a protein mortar — a ceramic three thousand times tougher than the mineral it is made of, and the most-copied structure in materials science.

• Naphtha

  The refinery cut that becomes plastic. Everything between petroleum gas and kerosene, and the single most important feedstock in the chemical industry.

• Natural rubber

  Latex tapped from a tree and cured with sulfur — a material that returns to its shape after enormous deformation, which almost nothing else does.

• Neoprene

  The first commercially successful synthetic rubber, and the only one most people can name — because of the wetsuit.

• Nylon

  The first fully synthetic fibre — stronger than silk, and the material that proved a laboratory could out-perform an organism.

• Optical fibre

  Glass so clear you could see through kilometres of it — the material that carries essentially all long-distance communication.

• Paper

  A mat of cellulose fibres bonded by hydrogen bonds alone — no adhesive, and where most harvested wood ends up.

• Pearl

  Nacre deposited in the round — the only gem needing no cutting, and, since 1916, the only major one whose market is almost entirely farmed.

• Peat

  Plant matter that could not rot — coal's first step, the largest terrestrial carbon store there is, and a fuel whose extraction costs more carbon than burning it.

• PEEK

  The plastic that behaves like a metal — 250 °C continuous service, near-total chemical resistance, and a price to match.

• Phenolic resin

  The first fully synthetic plastic, and still the one used where something must not burn — Bakelite, and the resin in every sheet of plywood.

• Phosphor

  A material that absorbs energy and gives it back as visible light — and the reason europium and terbium are mined.

• PLA

  Made from sugar rather than oil, and compostable in an industrial composter and almost nowhere else.

• Plastic

  The class rather than a material — a few hundred million tonnes a year of polymers that share a way of being shaped and very little else.

• Plywood

  Thin wood veneers glued with their grain crossed — which removes the one weakness wood has, and it is the oldest engineered composite there is.

• PMMA

  Clearer than glass and it shatters into blunt pieces — the aquarium wall, the aircraft canopy, the signage and the museum case.

• Polycarbonate

  Transparent and almost unbreakable — the safety glazing, the riot shield, the headlamp lens and the spectacle lens.

• Polyethylene

  The most-produced plastic in the world — a chain of carbon and hydrogen, whose properties depend almost entirely on how the chains are branched.

• Polyethylene terephthalate

  The polyester in every drinks bottle and most clothing — and the only plastic with a genuinely working recycling stream.

• Polypropylene

  The lightest common plastic, and the only one that survives being bent forever — the living hinge, the food tub, and half the world's rope.

• Polysilicon

  Silicon purified to nine or eleven nines — the traded commodity the entire solar industry rests on, and the most energy-intensive step in making a panel.

• Polystyrene

  Rigid, clear and brittle, and ninety-eight per cent air when foamed — the disposable cup, the packing block, and the insulation in the wall.

• Polytetrafluoroethylene

  Carbon wrapped in fluorine, which almost nothing sticks to and almost nothing attacks — the non-stick pan, the plumber's tape and the seal in the chemical plant.

• Polyurethane

  One chemistry, an enormous range of materials — the mattress, the insulation board, the varnish, the skateboard wheel and the shoe sole.

• Polyvinyl chloride

  C2H3Cl

  The polymer that is over half chlorine by weight — cheap, rigid or flexible on demand, and the reason chlor-alkali plants run at the scale they do.

• POM

  The plastic that replaced small metal parts — stiff, slippery, dimensionally stable, and the standard material for a moulded gear.

• Porcelain

  Clay, feldspar and quartz fired until they partly turn to glass — white, translucent, non-porous, and a Chinese secret for six hundred years.

• Portland cement

  The hydraulic binder in almost all modern concrete, made by burning limestone with clay.

• Precious coral

  The skeleton of a deep-water colonial animal, red because of a carotenoid rather than a metal — and slow-growing enough that the trade has outrun it repeatedly.

• Refractory brick

  The lining every furnace is built from — and it is chosen to match what will be melted against it, not for how hot it can get.

• Reinforced concrete

  Concrete that can be pulled as well as pushed — and it works because steel and concrete happen to expand at almost exactly the same rate.

• Resin

  A tree's wound response, tapped and distilled — the source of turpentine, of rosin, of frankincense, and, given forty million years, of amber.

• Rubber

  The class of materials that stretch a long way and come back — one property, a dozen chemistries, and most of it on wheels.

• Sand

  The second most consumed material on earth after water, and one the world is genuinely running short of — not of sand, but of the shape of sand that works.

• Seawater

  The largest chemical reservoir on the planet — where magnesium, bromine and most of the world's salt come from, and where every soluble element eventually ends up.

• Silicone rubber

  A polymer with no carbon in its backbone — which is why it stays flexible from −60 °C to 200 °C and does not care about sunlight.

• Silk

  A protein filament extruded by a caterpillar, kilometres long and stronger for its weight than steel — and the fibre nylon was invented to replace.

• Soda-lime glass

  The commonest glass — silica with soda to lower its melting point and lime to stop it dissolving in water.

• Stoneware

  Clay fired until it stops being porous — the difference between a plant pot and a mug, and it is a temperature rather than a recipe.

• Styrene-butadiene rubber

  The most-produced synthetic rubber there is, and most of it is on a car — the tread compound of the world's tyres.

• Technical ceramic

  Engineered inorganic non-metallic materials — hard, heat-resistant, chemically inert, and brittle in a way that governs how they are used.

• Wood

  A cellular composite of cellulose and lignin — the only major structural material that is grown rather than extracted.

• Wool

  Animal hair with scales and a permanent crimp — the fibre that insulates while wet, resists fire, and felts if you are careless with it.