Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters is the most interesting, entertaining, educationally enhancing book I've read in a long time. The 'stuff' Mark Miodownik writes about is the often anonymous material we use every day in all manner of ways, and take for granted; but without it, society as we know it, civilization indeed, couldn't function. Steel results from heating iron in the presence of small -- and varying -- amounts of carbon, sometimes subjecting it to being beaten as it cools from a molten or near-molten state.  The Japanese craftsmen who made Samurai swords discovered this empirically thousands of years ago, and so did a few other small, select tribes or clans in various parts of the world. This enabled them to make swords strong enough to vanquish enemies in warfare without their swords shattering as they would have if made merely of cast iron, or softer, more malleable bronze.We use steel in innumerable peaceful ways too of course, most successfully perhaps in the chemin de fer, the iron roads -- rails -- on which our trains run. And of course also to build the bridges, viaducts and earth-moving equipment that smoothes the uneven terrain over which the rails, and the trains, must run.   Concrete, exploited by the Romans and reinforced with iron, made the magnificent dome of the Pantheon temple in Rome, still after 2000 years I think the largest (and surely the most aesthetically lovely) dome in the world. Did you know that concrete results not from the drying-out of a liquid paste of its ingredients, but from the absorption of water into this paste? I didn't, but now this factoid is part of my lifetime accumulation of information. Paper is one of the four great Chinese discoveries, also enormously important, indeed essential to civilization in everything from battle plans to intimate love letters (Mark Miodownik reproduces a love letter from his wife to him, to illustrate this use of paper). The essential ingredient of paper is a paste of cellulose that dries to varying thickness and durability. There was so much I didn't know before I read Stuff Matters. I didn't know that the Shard, the extraordinary glass pinnacle beside Tower bridge in London, is the tallest building in Europe, or that some 3000 people work in it -- it looks smaller in its pictures. I do know that it's the most striking architectural structure of the contemporary London cityscape, the one I'd most like to go back again to London to see for myself. Ah, life's too short: so many things I want to do but can't because my range is increasingly restricted by infirmity and old age.