Further Reading

Some recommendations for those who want to burrow deeper into the Material World

One of the best things about writing a book is getting emails and letters (and reviews!) from readers. And one email I just received reminded me of something quite important (thanks Mickey): while the physical and ebook editions of Material World include a short section with acknowledgements and a lengthier bibliography, for obvious reasons this doesn’t find its way into the audiobook.

With that in mind, here is the main bit of the bibliography section of Material World.

This book barely scratches the surface of the Material World, but the good news is that there is a trove of reading material out there should you want to venture any deeper. My only warning, and I’m speaking from experience here, is that this sort of thing can be extremely addictive. Before you know it, you’re trapped deep in a wormhole about alum production or hydrocracking or silicon boules, from which it is very difficult to escape. If you’re willing to take that risk, however, here are a few places to start.

If you had to distil the Material World and shape it into human form you would end up with something resembling Vaclav Smil, the Czech-born scientist based these days at the University of Manitoba in Canada. His research has informed many parts of this book and if you are after more, be it the history of fertilisers or steel or the arc of human energy use from ancient times to the present day, you will find most of it somewhere in his works, many of which are cited below. Perhaps the best place to start, though, is with his 2022 book How the World Really Works. Another theme that overarches much of this book – that what we call the industrial revolution was really an energy revolution owes a lot to the late Tony Wrigley, whose 2010 book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution transformed thinking on the topic. Energy really is everything; the further I ventured into the Material World, the more I realised this. One excellent user guide to this is Richard Rhodes’s Energy: A Human History.

If you are interested in material science, a good place to begin is with J.E. Gordon’s The New Science of Strong Materials. There are plenty of excellent popular science books, too, from Ivan Amato’s Stuff and Stephen Sass’s The Substance of Civilization to Mark Miodownik’s Stuff Matters. John Browne’s Seven Elements That Have Changed the World is similarly useful, and should you like to dive deeper into material-specific rabbit holes, here are a few more suggestions.

Sand

There are two excellent books on sand, Michael Welland’s Sand: The Never-Ending Story and Vince Beiser’s The World in a Grain. For a compelling argument about the centrality of glass to human development, read The Glass Bathyscaphe by Gerry Martin and Alan Macfarlane, though if you’re after a more scientific primer, Seth Rasmussen’s How Glass Changed the World is worth a look.

There are plenty of textbooks you can find on the science and practice of concrete but for an overview, Robert Courland’s Concrete Planet is second to none. However, once you’ve got through that you’ll probably want more on the built world, and I recommend Building by Bill Addis, which also doubles as a chunky coffee-table book you will find yourself flicking through for years to come.

When I was writing the chapter on silicon chips, there was a surprising dearth of approachable books on semiconductor manufacturing. Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory is excellent on the early days of wafers at Bell Labs, and there is a great 1978 book called Revolution in Miniature by Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald. Then, shortly before I submitted my final draft, the world finally got the semiconductor book it always deserved, in the form of Chris Miller’s stupendous Chip War. If the journey along the silicon supply chain whetted your appetite, you know where to look next.

Salt

There are two fine ‘general interest’ books on salt, Pierre Laszlo’s Salt: Grain of Life and Mark Kurlansky’s magisterial Salt: A World History, but there are countless excellent papers and books that delve into the specifics of both salt and (the shadow topic of this chapter) chemicals.

For a deeper dive into the history of sodium chloride, consider picking up Samuel Adshead’s Salt and Civilization. The best place to start with the story of Chilean caliche is probably Thomas Hager’s The Alchemy of Air, which is also an excellent account of the tragic tale of Fritz Haber, whose inventions pockmark this book.

While Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World is a semi-fictionalised account of various scientific revelations and might not tell you all that much extra about high-pressure manufacturing techniques, its first chapter (which is 99 per cent accurate) is the most poetic account of Haber’s life that you’ll ever read.

Iron

The iron and copper chapters leaned heavily on Martin Lynch’s Mining in World History, the ultimate account of the evolution of this trade. Vaclav Smil’s Still the Iron Age is good on the specifics of steelmaking while Roger Osborne’s Iron, Steam & Money will guide you through the story of the English industrial revolution. The story of Stalin’s obsession with iron, and the city it spawned, is famously told by Stephen Kotkin in Magnetic Mountain. The latter part of this chapter, especially the sections about the future of steel, benefited enormously from Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen’s book Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open. You can download it for free from the Cambridge University site. Do so now. You won’t regret it.

Copper

Much of the early part of the copper chapter, about the electrical revolution, came from three books: the first volume of Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, The Path to Power, Thomas Parke Hughes’s Networks of Power, and The Next Greatest Thing, Richard Pence’s book, published by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, about the early days of rural power networks.

There are plenty of biographies of Thomas Edison, the most recent of which was written by Edmund Morris, but for a page-turning account of the battle of the electrical systems – a battle decided in part by the scarcity of copper – you couldn’t do much better than Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes.

For more on copper itself, Suzanne and Barry Golding’s Metals, Energy and Sustainability: The Story of Doctor Copper and King Coal is a trove, featuring even more on the great hole of Chuquicamata. The Malthusian v. Cornucopian wager between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon is recounted in the appropriately named The Bet by Paul Sabin. There is a whole book waiting to be written about deep-sea mining, though much of course will depend on whether it ever becomes a commercial reality.

Oil

One book towers over all others when it comes to the story of oil: Daniel Yergin’s The Prize. If you have any interest in modern history, let alone energy, go and get a copy immediately. Greg Zuckerman’s The Frackers is an excellent account of the shale revolution while Vaclav Smil’s Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century provides plenty more detail on methane, upon which we’re going to be reliant for decades, regardless of the geopolitical difficulties.

By far and away the best (perhaps the only) book explaining oil refining to ‘normal’ people is William Leffler’s Petroleum Refining in Nontechnical Language, without which I would never have been able to navigate any of those spaghetti junctions of pipes. Susan Freinkel’s Plastic: A Toxic Love Story is a good entrypoint to the story of petrochemicals while William Reader’s two-volume history of ICI has more detail than you’ll ever need on the origin story of many of these extraordinary substances – not to mention more on salt. If anyone would like to write a book on the subsequent demise of ICI, you have at least one ready reader here.

Lithium

The coming decades will doubtless see many excellent books on lithium and battery chemicals but at the time of writing two of the strongest were Seth Fletcher’s Bottled Lightning and Steve LeVine’s The Powerhouse, though Henry Sanderson’s Volt Rush, published in 2022, provides even more detail and colour about the mining and materials we need to power the future.

If you want to know more about Tesla and its rollercoaster ride to prominence, you could read Power Play by Tim Higgins. While the final section of the lithium chapter dealt with Congo only in passing, I need little excuse to recommend Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. The period it covers precedes Congo’s copper and uranium trade but no other book will give you as clear a sense of the malaise and mistreatment that hampered the prospects of this once-great African nation.

There’s also a fuller list of some of the papers and journals which helped inform this voyage into the Material World at my other website. However, the above is hardly an exhaustive list. Please do share any recommendations you have in the comments section here as I’m sure there’s plenty of excellent titles I’ve either failed to mention or haven’t read. And I’d love to read more on this, as I hope would many of you.