Welcome to the Material World
More, I hope, than just a book
I’ve spent the best part of the past three years working on a book called Material World. The elevator pitch is that it’s an attempt to tell the story of the modern world (and a bit of its history and future) from the vantage point of six important substances upon which civilisation depends.
Those materials are as follows:
Sand, the foundations of the modern world, the silicon substrate from which we make glass, concrete and even silicon chips.
Salt, the chemical without which life on this planet couldn’t exist. An enormously underrated material which still provides the backbone for much of the chemical and pharmaceutical world today.
Iron, the skeleton of the built world, from which we make steel, which is important not just for what we make out of it but for what we make with it. It’s the ultimate tool.
Copper, from which the electrical networks of the world are made. It’s hard to overemphasise how much copper matters - especially given we are steaming towards a green energy transition which will depend largely on electrifying pretty much everything.
Oil (and gas) - even in today’s world, we still depend enormously, massively, on oil and gas. The world is still mostly propelled by oil. It is still fed thanks to hydrocarbon-derived fertilisers. It deploys oil products in our batteries, in our plastics, in pretty much every consumer product.
Lithium, the element without which nearly all of the world’s most advanced batteries wouldn’t work. If we want decent, long-lasting rechargeable batteries we’ll probably always need lithium.
It’s not an exhaustive list. Of course it’s not. The striking thing about the world we live in today is just how far and wide we range across the periodic table, from rare metals to rare earths. The earliest circuit boards contained 11 elements. The ones you get in smartphones these days contain more than 60. But the reason I’ve zeroed in on these materials is that they are especially important.
We could (and do) make batteries without cobalt these days. But there is an elemental logic to making them out of lithium: its lightness, its energetic properties. We can make motors without neodymium, the most significant of the rare earth metals. But you can’t really conceive of civilisation without the six materials above.
Sand - in the fabric of the world and in silicon chips; salt in our chemicals, our bleaches and pharmaceuticals, oil to provide fuels and petrochemicals, iron to provide the tools everything else is made out of, copper to help electrify our lives... We sometimes take for granted how much these commonplace materials matter. We sometimes focus blindly on sexy space age materials and nanotechnology, but one of the messages of the book will be that it’s sometimes worth spending a moment contemplating the simple substances that built the world. That turns out to hold even more inspiring and unexpected lessons.
And in the course of writing the book I realised a few things. One was that when you start looking at the world via these materials it looks very different to how it does through the prism I’d tended to deploy for most of my career, which is to say the macroeconomic prism, where we peer down from 30,000 feet via supply/demand curves and aggregate statistics. Look from the bottom up and suddenly everything seems fresh and new.
We humans have become extraordinarily good at turning seemingly simple substances into products of amazing intricacy and effectiveness, from silicon chips with features so small they are literally invisible to solar panels whose price is falling precipitously year on year to transformers and turbines which get better and better each year.
There’s a famous Peter Thiel quote about how they promised us flying cars and we got 160 characters. But spend a bit of time in the Material World, where nanotechnology is not a buzzword but a statement of what some of these companies do every day and you begin to realise that actually there are extraordinary scientific leaps occurring all the time. Perhaps we’re all too engrossed with social networks to pay them enough attention?
On the flip side, when you see the world from the materials’ perspective you start to see why it will be such a challenge to get to net zero. We need to reimagine a whole panoply of industrial processes, many of which we haven’t really refined all that much since the Victorian era. Take solar panels. The silicon inside them is refined in a process which involves throwing chunks of rock into an electric arc furnace alongside coking coal and wood chips. Or take nitrogen fertilisers: they’re mostly made using natural gas. The deeper I ventured into this world, the more I realised that pretty much *every* industrial process produces carbon, or at the very least is very energy intensive. Getting to net zero isn’t just about building more wind turbines; it’s about reappraising the nature of industry. Many within the industrial and engineering community get this, but it’s a lesson we ought to be talking about more.
There’s a few reasons for this blog/newsletter. First and most obviously, I really want as many people as possible to buy this book. I think it’s a genuinely fascinating topic. It’s comfortably the most interesting thing I’ve ever researched. So hopefully via this newsletter I’ll be able to whet your appetites. Sebastian on Twitter kindly said the following:
Well, the answer is yes: this will be a lot like those threads on Twitter. Except (I hope) possibly even more interesting. And with a bit more of a narrative. Over the past few years I’ve journeyed around the world, visited the deepest mine in Europe, searched for the perfect grain of sand, watched the ponds where lithium is extracted and the battery machines which turn those chemicals into products. There’s a lot of stories to tell.
But this isn’t just about publicity and marketing. It’s about a couple of other things too. First, I simply have quite a lot of extra material I didn’t get to fit into the book. I’m planning to publish a fair amount of this “bonus material” on this newsletter in the coming months.
Second, and probably more to the point, the topics I cover in the book are very much live issues. Whether it’s the energy transition, battery and solar technology, silicon chips and silicon policy, industrial strategy and economic autarky, the issues that surround the Material World will continue to evolve before and after the book’s publication. Hopefully this will be a good place to keep abreast of some of those stories, and to provide extra up-to-date material for anyone who has read the book and would like a little more.
Anyway, more posts to come in the coming weeks. Some random stuff, some eye-catching stuff and above all else, some interesting stuff. I hope you enjoy your journey into the Material World as much as I have. Spread the word. And please pre-order the book!
Really interested in your book and the content!
Best 2024 book, thanks for investing in publishing it.