This extravagance is both a product of advances in materials and a challenge in its future growth. Our claim to a high level of materials civilization rests on this expanded, almost extravagant utilization of a rich diversity of materials. 2 Not only are more of nature’s elements being put into service, but completely new materials are being synthesized in the laboratory. We now employ in industrial processes a majority of the ninety-two elements in the periodic table which are found in nature, whereas until a century ago, all but 20, if known at all, were curiosities of the chemistry laboratory.
Some of these do better, or cheaper, what the older ones did others have combinations of properties that enable entirely new devices to be made or quite new effects to be achieved. A great new range of materials has opened up for the use of 20th-century man: refractory metals, light alloys, plastics, and synthetic fibers, for example. Not only are we consuming materials more rapidly, but we are using an increasing diversity of materials. 1 This expanding use of materials is itself revolutionary, and hence forms an integral part of the “materials revolution” of our times. Indeed, it has been postulated that, assuming current trends in world production and population growth, the materials requirements for the next decade and a half could equal all the materials used throughout history up to date. We use more materials than ever before, and we use them up faster. One of the hallmarks of modern industrialized society is our increasing extravagance in the use of materials. Nature itself is a self-ordered structure which developed through time by the utilization of the same properties of atomic hierarchy that man presides over in his simple constructions. Materials by themselves do nothing yet without materials man can do nothing. Today, the field logically encompasses the lonely prospector and the advanced instrumented search for oil it spreads from the furious flame of the oxygen steelmaking furnace to the quiet cold electrodeposition of copper from the massive rolling mill producing steel rails to the craftsman hammering out a chalice or a piece of jewelry from the smallest chip of an electronic device to the largest building made by man from the common paper-bag to the titanium shell of a space ship from the clearest glass to carbon black from liquid mercury to the hardest diamond from superconductors to insulators from the room-temperature casting plastics to infusible refractories (except they can be melted today) from milady’s stocking to the militant’s bomb from the sweating blacksmith to the cloistered contemplating scholar who once worried about the nature of matter and now tries to calculate the difference between materials. Historically, it began with the emergence of man himself, and materials gave name to the ages of civilization.
The field of materials is immense and diverse.
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