Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern CivilizationTHE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates. Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 25 | |
Homo Faber | 27 |
Built upon Sand | 63 |
The Longest Journey | 87 |
PART TWO Salt | 123 |
Salt Routes | 125 |
Salt of the Earth | 143 |
The Hole | 265 |
The Deep | 290 |
PART FIVE | 307 |
The Elephant | 309 |
Pipes | 327 |
The Everything Thing | 344 |
Peak Oil | 361 |
White Gold | 371 |
The Fire Drug | 163 |
Many Salts | 177 |
PART THREE Iron | 193 |
You Dont Have a Country | 195 |
Inside the Volcano | 214 |
The Last Blast | 233 |
PART FOUR Copper | 249 |
The Next Greatest Thing | 251 |
Jelly Rolls | 397 |
Unmanufacturing | 413 |
Conclusion | 425 |
Notes | 445 |
Bibliography | 461 |
Acknowledgements | 471 |
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Common terms and phrases
alongside Atacama atoms Azovstal battery began beneath blast furnaces Boulby brine Britain British build called carbon emissions cement cent century chemicals Chile Chilean China chloralkali process Chuqui Chuquicamata coal cobalt concrete copper create crude decades desert early earth economic energy engines enormous extract fertilisers fossil fuels German Ghawar Gigafactory glass global gold grains ground happened human hydrogen important industry ingredient inside iron journey lithium Lochaline look manufacture Mariupol Material World metal metres miles million miners mining modern natural gas nitrates oil and gas Pilbara pipes plant plastic polyhalite production pumped quartz recycling refined refinery revolution Rio Tinto rock Salar Salar de Atacama salt sand Saudi semiconductor ship silica silicon chips smartphone steel stone story stuff substance supply chain Tesla thing tion tonnes transistors TSMC turn Ukraine Umicore vast wafers wind turbines world’s biggest