Material World
The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
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4.6 • 19 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
THE 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What are the physical ingredients without which civilization really would grind to a halt, and where do they actually come from?" Conway (The Summit), the economics and data editor at Sky News, sets out to answer that question in this enlightening study. He suggests that copper, iron, lithium, oil, salt, and sand form the bedrock of the modern world, noting that silica, which constitutes "the main ingredient in most sands," is melted in furnaces to create silicon chips, and that saltpeter's rich stores of nitrogen make the substance a valuable fertilizer. Reporting on his travels to witness the extraction and processing of the six materials, Conway describes how ore from the Chuquicamata copper mine in Chile is ground to dust and "frothed up in a special liquid solution that helps separate copper from the rest." The nimble prose transforms chemical and industrial processes into riveting entertainment, and passages tracing how the struggle to access these materials has shaped world history fascinate. For instance, Conway explains that Hitler invaded Ukraine in 1941 to plunder the country's bountiful iron deposits and that the Saltpeter War between Bolivia and Chile was sparked in 1879 by a dispute over control of lucrative caliche (a salt used in explosives) mines in the Atacama Desert. It's a sweeping look at the building blocks of the industrialized world.
