ITHACA, N.Y. --"My children have very little idea of what is behind these and other marvelous inventions, which they see as so commonplace. This book is to help them appreciate and wonder at the material nature of our world. Perhaps with talent and luck and perseverance they or their peers will discover an extraordinary new substance."
So begins Cornell professor of materials science Stephen L. Sass in his new book The Substance of Civilization, (Arcade Publishing, New York: $24.95), a global tour of the way in which the stuff of existence has shaped events, ushered in eras and precipitated revolutions. From the age of stone to the era of high-tech, Sass looks at the substances that have made our world, with its skyscrapers and jumbo jets, possible.
In an interview, Sass repeated a common scientific lament as the reason for writing the book. "People in science and engineering understand something about the arts, but there is no reciprocity," he says. "People in the arts and humanities know very little about science and technology."
His book, he says, is an attempt to convince non-scientists that materials of science has not only had an impact on civilization but is the engine that drives today's world.
Sass's book is just 291 pages long, but it is a tour of the history of civilization, from the Stone Age, through the Bronze Age, into the Iron Age and thence to the Industrial Revolution and the age of technology. Included are the developments of glass and concrete, polymers, aluminum and the silicon chip. Publishers Weekly said in a review that the book "feels like a comfortable conversation over coffee with a person passionate about 10 millennia of material history and culture." Kirkus Reviews described the book as having "gobs of wonderful trivia as well as accounts of the technological innovations that led to ever hotter furnaces, blown glass, steel from iron, and all the latter-day wonders."
Although Sass says he enjoyed writing about the history of materials, his real fascination was with the connections between materials and the transitions to new eras, usually the result of a shortage of resources. About 1300 B.C., for example, when the most commonly used metal was bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, there was unrest in the Near East and the region of the Eastern Mediterranean, with large migrations of people and general turmoil along the trade routes. This led to a squeezing of the supply of tin and a search for ways of smelting iron from ore in large quantities. Within a few hundred years iron had become the metal of choice.
Skip forward more than 2,000 years to England where iron was in ever-increasing demand -- largely by the military for weapons -- as was wood to create the charcoal for the smelting process. "But that meant cutting down forests, which created a timber famine and drove people to look around for a replacement, which of course was coal," says Sass. As the coal mines went deeper into the ground, flooding became a problem, which led to the development of the steam-driven pump, developed by Newcomen in 1712 and then improved by Watt.
Sass continues: "The story is fun because you can keep pushing the connections further and further. To carry the large quantities of coal needed to make the iron, transportation was needed, leading to the development of the English canal system. To transport the coal from the mines to the canals the mine operators began hauling carts on rails, first by horses, then by steam engines." But the wrought iron rails were so soft they were easily squashed and had to be rotated every six months or so. That led to the development in 1855 of Sir Henry Bessemer's process for controlling the amount of carbon in iron and producing high-strength steel.
"And all of these developments were originally driven by the shortage of wood," Sass muses.
But something else also happened in the 18th and 19th centuries, says Sass, that was part of the discovery and extraction of new materials, which for millennia had been the province of crafts people. That something was the development of the scientific method by researchers such as Lavoisier in France and Priestley in England who first began carrying out systematic experimentation. The "enormous explosion in new materials over the last 200 years," says Sass, is largely due to researchers such as these.
Today, materials research is entirely the province of the scientist, who, says Sass, no longer has the task of discovering new raw materials. "The exciting challenge of the next century will be learning how to manipulate known materials and to formulate new substances on the near-atomic or nanometer scale," he says.
For a review copy of Sass's book call Jeannette Seaver at Arcade Publishing, (212) 475-2633.