Material World
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award Picked as a Book of the Year by THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST and NEW STATESMAN A BBC RADIO 4 Book of the Week 'A compelling narrative of the human story' TIM MARSHALL, author of Prisoners of Geography 'Lively, rich and exciting... full of surprises' PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads _____ Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. They built our world, and they will transform our future. These are the six most crucial substances in human history. They took us from the Dark Ages to the present day. They power our computers and phones, build our homes and offices, and create life-saving medicines. But most of us take them completely for granted. In Material World, Ed Conway travels the globe - 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 - to uncover a secret world we rarely see. Revealing the true marvel of these substances, he follows the mind-boggling journeys, miraculous processes and little-known companies that turn the raw materials we all need into products of astonishing complexity. As we wrestle with climate change, energy crises and the threat of new global conflict, Conway shows why these substances matter more than ever before, and how the hidden battle to control them will shape our geopolitical future.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
17mentions
15people
2023–2026years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I need to recommend Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. Truly fascinated story also available on audible. For anyone interested into how "things works" generally is this a must.
Happy new year!
- A great book that goes deeper into the sand industry is The Material World by Ed Conway. Highly recommended!
- Here's an exception to these general rules (first names appearing in surnames) is Peterman: you'd think it was some kind of relation to a relative named peter, but it is actually a name for a profession. A Peterman was someone tasked with finding deposits of saltpeter for the production of fertlizer and gunpower.
A partial documentation is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltpetre_works
A better narrative of this industry is in Ed Conway's book "Material World" https://edconway.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-material-worl...
- I'm still reading it, but the book Material World by Ed Conway has been very informative and enjoyable to read. It's a book that I've been looking for for a long time. It explores how different common natural resources are intertwined with one another and their role in our every day lives. It also contains a lot of details about the processes and economics related to their extraction and how they are turned into usable forms.
- Ed Conway's book Material World has more about silicon.
An even more obscure mine in Spain is used for the quartz to make the crucibles that hold molten silicon. For some reason its melting point is just far enough above that of silicon metal to make the process feasible.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Materials-Modern-Civil...
- Another book on this is:
_Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization_ by Ed Conway
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world
>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
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