Not only are we consuming materials more rapidly, but we are using an increasing diversity of materials. 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. 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. 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.2 Not only are more of nature’s elements being put into service, but completely new materials are being synthesized in the laboratory. Our claim to a high level of materials civilization rests on this expanded, almost extravagant utilization of a rich diversity of materials.
Materials by themselves do nothing; yet without materials man can do nothing. 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.
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Not only are we consuming materials more rapidly, but we are using an increasing diversity of materials. 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. 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. 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.2 Not only are more of nature’s elements being put into service, but completely new materials are being synthesized in the laboratory. Our claim to a high level of materials civilization rests on this expanded, almost extravagant utilization of a rich diversity of materials.
Materials by themselves do nothing; yet without materials man can do nothing. 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.