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Native metals, like gold, silver, and copper, were hammered into decorative objects during the 8th millennium B. However, it was not until man learned to smelt. See also Theodore A. Again, the early advantage was only an economic one, the mineral ores of copper being vastly more abundant than is the native metal, but the way was opened for alloying and the discovery of entirely unsuspected properties.
Moreover, with molten metal, casting into complicated shapes became possible,. The discovery of smelting has left no records, Given the availability of adequately high-temperatures in pottery kilns and the use of metal oxides for decoration, drops of reduced metal could well have been produced repeatedly before the significance was grasped. But once it was, empirical experiments with manipulation of the fire and the selection of the appropriate heavy, colored minerals would have given the desired materials with reasonable efficiency. A kiln works best with a long-flame fuel such as wood; smelting is best done with charcoal and with a blast from a plowpipe or bellows, but the time when these were first used has yet to be established.
For a thousand years, these alloys were exploited, until finally they were largely replaced by bronze, an alloy made from a heavy readily identifiable, though scarce, mineral, and having somewhat superior properties to those of the copper-arsenic alloys; there was also the added advantage that those who knew how to use it lived longer! A lively argument is currently going on among archeologists as to whether the original discovery of bronze took place in the region of Anatolia and the adjacent countries to the South and East or in Eastern Europe—or independently in both. Though the earliest stone industry and commerce had required some organized system of production, and division of labor was well advanced in connection with large irrigation and building projects, 18 the use of metals fostered a higher degree of specialization and diversity of skills; it also required communication and coordination to a degree previously unknown.
Both trade and transportation owe much of their development to the requirements of materials technology: Rotary motion had many applications that were more influential than the well-known cartwheel. Materials development had an impact on culture in other ways than through the improvement of artifacts.
The new tools allowed for new methods of working materials: This page was last edited on 21 May , at The celebrity chef kept her response simple and sure: They exploited it to extremely good purpose reinforced with stone rubble or with hard bricks in the construction of buildings, bridges, and aqueducts. Stewart was removed from the official line-up in but continued as a touring member until his death in The growth of the scientific technology in the study of materials during the 19th century parallels a similar development in other fields of engineering. The Rolling Stones discography.
This can perhaps best be seen in the development of writing. The growth of commerce and government stimulated the need for records. The materials to produce the records undoubtedly influenced the nature of the writing itself and, if modern linguistic scholars are correct, probably some details of the language structure and hence the mode of thought. The Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates valley had abundant clay to serve as their stationery, and the sharp stylus employed with it did not allow a cursive writing to develop; did this have some impact on the ways in which they thought, spoke, and acted?
The Egyptions, on the other hand, could adapt the interwoven fibers of a reed growing in the Nile delta to produce a more flexible medium, papyrus, on which they could write with brushes and ink in less restricted ways. Thus, the differences between the cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing were dependent on the differences in materials available, quite as much as were the mud-brick and stone architecture of their respective regions.
At the time, the visual arts were probably more significant than writing, for relatively few people, except professional scribes, would have been influenced by the latter. Certainly, our retrospective view of old civilizations depends on the preservation of art in material form, and the material embodiment of thought and symbol in the visual environment must have modified the experience and behavior of ancient peoples, even as it does today.
The replacement of copper and bronze by iron began about B. Iron had been produced long before then, because iron ores are prevalent and easily reduced at temperatures comparable to those required for smelting copper. However, the iron was probably not recognized as such, because at those temperatures it is not melted, but remains as a loose sponge of particles surrounded by slag and ash, being easily crumbled or pulverized and having no obvious metallic properties.
If, on the other hand, the porous mass is hammered vigorously while hot, the particles weld together, the slag is forced out, and bars of wrought iron are produced. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: Though metallic iron may have been previously seen as occasional lumpy by-products from lead and copper smelting in which iron oxides were used to make siliceous impurities in the iron more fusible , its intentional smelting is commonly attributed to the Hittites, an Anatolian people, about B.
The Hittite monopoly of ferrous knowledge was dispersed with the empire about B. Immense skill was needed to remove the oxygen in the ore by reaction with the charcoal fuel without allowing subsequent absorption of carbon to a point where the reduced metal became brittle. Moreover, each ore had its own problems with metalloid and rocky impurities. Certain forms of iron—those to which the name steel was once limited—can become intensely hard when heated red hot and quenched in water.
This truly marvelous transmutation of properties must have been observed quite early, but its significance would have been hard to grasp and, in any case, it could not be put to use until some means of controlling the carbon content had been developed. Since the presence of carbon as the essential prerequisite was not known until the end of the 18th century A.
It is not surprising that this was rarely successful. Yet, even without hardening, iron had no difficulty in supplanting bronze for many applications. Its abundance meant that the elite could not control it. From about B. Iron tools together with evolving organization arrangements greatly increased the productivity of agriculture, giving a surplus which could support large numbers of specialized craftsmen whose products, in turn, could become generally available instead of being monopolized by the wealthiest ruling circles.
Furthermore, tools formerly made of bronze or stone—such as adzes, axes, chisels, drills, hammers, gravers, saws, gauges—could be made less expensively and more satisfactorily in iron. The new tools allowed for new methods of working materials: These metalworking methods were easily harnessed to water power when it appeared and opened up ways of making more serviceable and cheaper products. Though it was not immediately exploited, the strength of metals permitted the construction of delicate machines.
Iron was at first used structurally only for reinforcing joints in stone or wood, but later its strength and stability were combined with precision in creating the modern machine tool, and its large-scale fabrication also made modern architecture possible. It has been claimed that bronze made for the centralization of economic power as well as the concentration of political authority in the hands of an aristocratic few, while iron broadened the economic strength to a larger class of traders and craftsmen and so led to the decentralization of power and eventually to the formation of Athenian democracy.
Although the classical civilization of Greece rather fully exploited the possibilities offered by metals and other materials available to them from preceding ages, producing beautifully-wrought ceramics, exquisite jewelry, superb sculpture, and an architecture which still represents one of the peaks of the Western cultural and aesthetic tradition, they did little to innovate in the field of materials themselves.
The same is true of the Romans who acquired a great reputation as engineers, and rightly so, but this rests largely upon the monumental scale of their engineering endeavors—the great roads, aqueducts, and public structures—rather than upon any great mechanical innovations or the discovery of new materials. There is one exception to this generalization. The Romans did introduce a new building material: The use of lime mortar is extremely old, probably even preceding the firing of pottery, and lime plaster was used for floor and wall covering, for minor works of art and later for the lining of water reservoirs and channels.
It can be made by firing limestone at a moderate red heat; it sets hard when mixed with water and allowed slowly to react with carbon dioxide in the air. If, however, the limestone contains alumina and silica geologically from clay and is fired at a higher temperature, a material of the class later to be called hydraulic, or Portland, cement is formed. After grinding and mixing with water, this sets by the crystallization of hydrated silicates even when air is excluded and develops high strength. The Romans were fortunate in having available large quantities of volcanic ash, pozzuolana, which, when mixed with lime, gave such a cement.
They exploited it to extremely good purpose reinforced with stone rubble or with hard bricks in the construction of buildings, bridges, and aqueducts. Massive foundations and columns were much more easily built than with the older fitted-stone construction, and, unlike mortar, the cement was waterproof. By combining the new cement with the structural device of the arch, the Romans could roof-over large areas without the obstructions of columns.
The case of hydraulic cement is representative of materials usage from antiquity until modern times. Namely, it was developed entirely on an empirical basis, without much in way of any science underlying the useful properties. The great Greek philosophers, to be sure, had worried about the nature of matter and the three states in which it exists—solid, liquid, and gas. These, indeed, constitute three of the four famous elements of Aristotle which dominated philosophy for nearly years.
His earth, water, and air represent fine physical insight, but they had to be rejected by chemists in their search for compositional elements. The main contribution to early understanding came from the more intelligent empirical workers who discovered new materials, new reactions, and new types of behavior among the grand diversity of substances whose properties could be reproduced, but not explained except on an ad hoc basis.
Moreover, the science needed was a kind that was slow to emerge because of the extreme complexity of the problems involved. Unlike astronomy, there was little place for accurate measurements or geometry in materials, and those who sought to find rules were perpetually frustrated. The curious experimenter, however, by mixing, heating, and working materials in a myriad of ways did uncover virtually all of the materials with properties that were significant to him, namely, strength, malleability, corrosion resistance, color, texture, and fusibility.
Then it was discovered that chemical substances of identical composition could differ in their internal structure, and finally structure became relatable to properties in a definite way; in fact, it was found possible to modify the structure purposefully to achieve a desired effect. There have been many interpretations of the decline and fall of the Great Roman Empire.
The early Christian apologists claimed that Rome fell because it was wicked and immoral; in the 18th century, Gibbon blamed the fall of Rome upon Christianity itself. Gilfillan claimed that the decline of Rome was due to a decline in the birth rate of the Roman patrician class coming from dysgenic lead poisoning. Throughout the first millennium after Christ, about the only places where ancient techniques of making and working materials underwent improvement were outside Europe—in the Arab World, Iran, India, and the Far East.
Textiles, ceramics, articles in silver and bronze and iron of excellent quality appeared. That portentous new material, paper, originated in China and began its Western diffusion. Though the armorers of the Western world were steadily enhancing their products, the Crusaders of the 12th century had no steel which could match that of the Saracen sword. The Japanese sword surpassed the Islamic one by an even greater margin than the latter did the European. However, not for several centuries did these Oriental priorities in materials processing have any effect upon the materials science or technology of contemporary Western Christendom.
For all this, the first significant literature on materials is European—the Treatise on Divers Arts written about , by a Benedictine monk under the pseudonym Theophilus. Theophilus was no materials engineer in the modern sense, but he was a craftsman, probably, the historical goldsmith Roger of Helmarshausen, some of whose work has survived. His knowledge of matter was the directly-sensed, intuitive understanding that comes from constantly handling a wide variety of substances under different conditions.
His Treatise is essentially a factual. There have been two recent English translations of Theophilus: Hawthorne, University of Chicago Press, Chicago For a further discussion, see Lynn White, Jr. Theory does not appear in treatises intended to help the practical worker in materials until years later—well into the 18th century. Although the nature of materials themselves did not change greatly in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, a number of mechanical inventions facilitated both their production and their shaping. This practice considerably increased when windpower supplemented the older waterpower, with the technique, as so much else, diffusing from the East.
Textiles at first benefited only by the use of waterpower in the fulling process, but the mechanically simpler and more laborious metallurgical processes changed substantially. In ironworking, waterpower was applied successively to bellows, to hammers, and eventually 15th century to slitting, rolling, and wire drawing. A series of mechanical innovations and improvements led to advances in the manufacturing and processing of other materials, too. Plant ash to make glass was replaced by more-or-less pure soda, and the furnaces to melt it in became larger.
Textile looms improved, especially with the introduction—from China—of the draw loom. Even more important was the development, near the close of the 13th century, of the spinning wheel, in place of the ancient handspun whorl, virtually unchanged since prehistoric times. Power not only enabled the scale of operation to be increased in ironworking, but the product was more uniform because of the extensive working that was possible.
In addition, the use of power changed the basic chemistry of the process. Although a large furnace is not needed in order to produce molten cast iron, it is much more easily made in a tall shaft furnace driven by powerful bellows than in a low hearth. Cast iron first appeared in Europe in the 14th century, following a sequence of developments which is unclear but which certainly involved power-driven bellows, larger furnaces, and perhaps hints from the East.
To begin with, cast iron was used only as an intermediate stage in the making of steel or wrought iron, and it was developed for its efficiency in separating iron from the ore by production of liquid metal and slag. However, cast iron that contains enough carbon to be fusible is brittle, and it took Europeans some time to realize its utility, although it had long been used in the Far East. It was inefficient because of the large amount of iron that remained in the slag, and the iron was defective because of the slag remaining in it.
The wrought iron produced from cast iron by the new finery process was made by oxidizing the carbon and silicon in cast iron instead of by the direct reduction of the iron oxide ore. The two-stage indirect process gradually displaced the direct method in all technologically advanced countries. Its main justification was economic efficiency, for the resulting product was still wrought iron or steel, finished below its melting point and containing many internal inclusions of iron-silicate slag.
In the late 18th century, the small hearth was replaced by a reverberatory puddling furnace which gave much larger output, but neither the chemistry nor the product was significantly different from that of the early finery. The early developments in iron and steel metallurgy occurred with no assistance from theory, which, such as it was, was far behind practice. Medieval alchemists were not experimenting with cast iron because they felt they understood its chemistry, and they had not thought of its many potential uses.
The Aristotelean theory of matter, essentially unchallenged in Medieval times, recognized the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of matter in three of the four elements—the earth, water, air, and fire. The theory encompassed the various properties of materials but was wrong in attributing their origin to the combination of qualities rather than things. Medieval alchemists in their search for a relation between the qualities of matter and the principles of the universe elaborated this theory considerably.
One of their goals—transmutation—was to change the association of qualities in natural bodies. In the days before the chemical elements had been identified, this was a perfectly sensible aim. What more proof of the validity of transmutation does one need than the change in quality of steel reproducibly accomplished by fire and water?
Or the transmutation of ash and sand into a brilliant glass gem, and mud into a glorious Attic vase or Sung celadon pot? Or the conversion of copper into golden brass? Of course, today we know that it is impossible to duplicate simultaneously all the properties of gold in the absence of atomic nuclei having a positive charge One way to secure a desired property is still to select the chemical entities involved but much can also be done by changing the structure of the substance. Modern alchemy is as much solid-state physics as it is chemistry, but it could not have appeared until chemists had unraveled the nature and number of the elements.
Urged on by the manifestly great changes of properties accompanying chemical operations, the alchemists worked on the same things that concerned the practical metallurgist, potter, and dyer of their day, but the two groups interacted not at all. They were right in believing that the property changes accompanying transmutation were manifestations of the primary principles of the universe, but they missed the significance of the underlying structure. Moreover, they overvalued a theory that was too ambitious, and so their literature is now of more value to students of psychology, mysticism, and art than it is a direct forerunner of modern science.
Yet the alchemists discovered some important substances; they developed chemical apparatus and processes which are basic to science today, and they represented an important tradition of the theoretically-motivated experimentation, even if they failed to correct their theory by the results of well-planned critical experiments. Two major technological developments helped precipitate the changes that signalized the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times: Both of these had earlier roots in Chinese technology and both were intimately related to materials.
In the case of printing, 32 all the necessary separate elements were in general use in Western Europe by the middle of the 15th century; paper, presses, ink and, if not moveable type, at least wood-block printing of designs on textiles and pictures and text on paper, and separate punches to impress letters and words on coins and other metalwork. But, they had not been put together in Europe. Papyrus and parchment had been known in ancient times. Paper made of vegetable fiber had been invented in China a thousand years earlier and had been introduced into Spain by the Arabs during the 12th century.
Simple presses were already in use for making wine and oil, while oil-based ink another essential element in the printing process had been developed by artists a short time previously. The idea for the most important element needed for mass production of verbal communication—reusable individual type—probably came to Europe from the Orient, although the history is obscure.
By the 11th century, Chinese printers were working with baked ceramic type mounted on a backing plate with an adhesive and removable for reuse. By the 14th century, in Korea, even. Multhauf, The Origins of Chemistry , Oldbourne, London provides an authoritative and lucid discussion of the development of chemical theory and practice and their relations to materials. The standard work on the history of printing is: Carrington Goodrich, 2nd ed.
Shortly after in Europe, everything came together in an environment so receptive that the development was amost explosive. Some chapter headings were printed in red, others inserted by hand. Part of the edition was printed on paper, part on vellum, the traditional material for permanence or prestige. Thus, a new technique for mass production and communication was established, ushering in a potential instrument for mass education. Modern times were beginning. The political and economic environment had been strongly influenced somewhat earlier by the introduction of gunpowder in Western Europe.
Here, too, it is uncertain whether introduction of gunpowder in the West was a result of independent discovery or diffusion from the Far East. At any rate, the application and development was different and prompt. As early as , primitive cannon were built in the West for throwing darts, arrows, and heavy stone balls, in competition with the mechanical artillery the ballista familiar since the days of the Romans, which were displaced completely by the middle of the 16th century. By , the musket had appeared, and began to render the cross-bow and long-bow obsolete.
By , bombards, mortars, and explosive mines caused the medieval elements of warfare—the fortified castle and the individual armored knight—to lose their military importance, and contributed to the decline of the feudal nobility. Even the layout of cities changed as a result of the new methods of warfare: Wright and Lawrence J. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.
Military needs sparked a great development in the scale of the material-producing industries during the Renaissance, but agriculture, construction, and the generally rising standard of living also contributed and benefited. The new supply of silver coming from Spanish operations in the New World and, no less, from the development of the liquation process for recovering silver from copper upset the monetary balance of Europe. Silver, pewter, wood, and the greatly-increased production of glazed ceramic vied with each other for domestic attention, and glass democratically appeared in more windows and on more tables.
We know much more about material-producing processes in the 16th century than we do of earler ages, because the printing press gave a wider audience and made it worthwhile for men to write down the details of their craft in order to instruct others rather than to keep their trade secrets. Some of our most famous treatises on materials technology date from the 16th century, and the best of these continued to be reprinted over years later—an indication that practices were not advancing rapidly.
Agricola was a highly literate and intellectually curious physician living in Bohemian Joachimstal and Silesian Chemnitz, both mining and smelting towns, and his systematic factual descriptions of minerals, mining, and smelting operations, all excellently illustrated, shed much light on the devices and techniques of the times. The scale is that of a capitalistic enterprise. Nevertheless, Agricola still thought in the same terms as did Theophilus; his de Re Metallica is simply a description of actual practice, devoid of any theoretical principles, though in other works he did speculate fruitfully on the nature and origin of minerals.
Sixteen years earlier, the Italian foundryman Vannoccio Biringuccio had published his de 1a Pirotechnia , which is much broader in scope. An English translation of Agricola was published by Herbert C. Both Agricola and Biringuccio describe the quantitative analytical methods for assaying ores and metallurgical products. In all these early writings, there is a strong bias toward the precious metals, gold and silver.
Even Biringuccio, who was concerned with end-use far more than other writers, had very little to say about iron despite the fact that this was the most common metal then, as now. The rough labor of the smith was almost beneath the notice of educated men. There is no comprehensive book devoted to iron until that of R. Other practical arts gradually received a place in the visible literature.
Cyril Stanley Smith, ed. Edelstein and Hector Borghetty, eds. Philosophical Society, Glascow ; 19, —59; , 25, —35; , 43, —58; , 44, — If in this treatment we seem to have overemphasized the 16th century, it is because intimate records become available for the first time of techniques built upon many centuries of slow consolidation of changes. These writings show vividly how much can be done without the benefit of science, but at their own times they served to disseminate to a large and new audience knowledge of the way materials behaved; such knowledge was an essential basis for later scientific attack.
With the exception of Agricola, all of this literature was written in the vernacular tongue, Italian, French, or German. It was part of the Reformation. Instead of theoretical dogma handed down from on high for intellectual gratification, it was down-to-earth practical information for the workshop and kitchen. The realization that theory could help this kind of practice was quite slow in emerging, and a real science of materials had to wait for another two centuries. In the meantime, the separate components of ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy, ceramics, dyeing, fiber technology, organic polymers, and structural engineering pursued their own separate lines of development, and the basic sciences of chemistry and physics slowly generated an understanding that would help explain practice, enrich, and extend it.
The linking of theoretical understanding with practical applications, the hallmark of MSE, did not occur with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century nor the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Tremendous advances occurred during the 17th to 19th centuries in scientific understanding of the nature and operation of the physical universe at both atomic and cosmic levels, but very little of this could find direct connection to the materials made and used by man.
Although major transformations were taking place in the processing and application of old materials, and new ones were being developed, these were largely the product of empirical advances within materials technology itself, owing little to contemporary scientific understanding. Indeed, the very complicated origins of the useful properties of materials precluded understanding by the necessarily simplistic methods of rigorous science. Though kinetics and elasticity were simple enough to be handled by the new mathematics, the mechanics of plasticity and fracture were utterly beyond it.
Unsuspected variations in composition and structure produced changes in properties that could be manipulated only by those who enjoyed messy reality. Science could advance only by ignoring these problems and finding others in which it was possible, both theoretically and experimentally, to exclude unknown, unwanted, or uncontrollable variables. Eventually, of course, on the fragmentary knowledge so acquired, it became possible to deal with real materials, but those properties that are structure-sensitive—which includes most of the interesting properties of.
It would surely have delayed understanding had some superpower insisted that physicists work upon important but insolvable at that time properties of matter. Materials practitioners cannot disregard those aspects of the behavior of matter simply because a scientist cannot deal with them.
The development of the different threads of knowledge proceeds each at its own pace. Every scientific concept has come about from an analytical understanding of only a part, albeit often the central part, of a real complex phenomenon. The approach usually requires a temporary blindness to some aspect of the rich behavior of nature, which stimulated the study in the beginning. A price is paid for each step in understanding. Eventually, however, the excluded aspects, at least if they are real, can be included in a higher synthesis. However, the history of MSE shows that this synthesis is more than the putting together of exact understanding of many parts; it is putting this understanding into a higher, or at least broader, framework which combines experience as well as logic.
All levels, all viewpoints must interact and the present tension between the different parts of the materials profession gives ground for hope that new methods of managing this difficult synthesis are beginning to emerge. It is rare for both attitudes of mind to be combined in one individual, but a tolerance indeed an enjoyment, of opposing points-of-view is one of the things that makes MSE so interesting today.
In the past, even when breakthroughs occurred which might have illumined the nature and structure of materials, their significance was not immediately apparent to the practitioner and the impact on technology was delayed. With only a few exceptions, the coupling of science to engineering had to await the slow development of new concepts, a tolerance for new approaches, and the establishment of new institutions to create a hybrid form: With hindsight, we can see how scientific advances of earlier times could have been adopted by contemporary engineers more promptly than they actually were.
Nevertheless, a practical metallurgist or potter quite rightly disregarded the theoretical chemistry of A. Both would have been quite useless to him. Yet, with the passing of time, these inapplicable approaches developed to the point where many new advances stemmed from them. We can equally wonder why scientists were frequently so obtuse as to make no attempt to investigate or to comprehend the fascinating complex problems which arose in practice.
Such an approach would have been completely a-historical. It would ignore the fact that the implications of new viewpoints tend not to be apparent to men whose practice and whose ideas are in productive harmony at the time; it would also ignore the fact that science and technology had developed out of different traditions—the philosophic and scholarly on one hand, the art and craft and oral tradition on the other.
A major reshuffling of attitudes and institutional devices was essential before the two could be brought together in a. Science arose from a kind of union between philosophy and technology, but it was only when both science and technology had each reached a high level of development that continued progress became difficult without concomitant advances in the other. It was then recognized that their unified actions were mutually beneficial, and of service to mankind.
The story of sal ammoniac in the 18th century is instructive in this regard. Multhauf has shown how virtually all of the chemical data needed in the various processes for producing sal ammoniac can be found in the scientific literature prior to the effective foundation of European industry. But it is difficult to prove how, if at all, the scientific knowledge was actually transmitted to the manufacturer who had to design large-scale, safe, and economical equipment, conceive of interdependent processes using the byproducts, and build the factories producing not just one but many marketable chemicals.
But if the technology of sal ammoniac was ultimately dependent upon science, the scientists played a very minor role in the industrialization of sal ammoniac production, which was accomplished primarily by men whose principal qualifications seemed to have been ingenuity and a spirit of enterprise. The great technological feats of the midth century—the hallmark inventions of the Industrial Revolution—came from men without formal training in science. The mechanicians who produced them, such as James Watt, were not unlettered men, and were not ignorant of the empirical science which they needed for their technical work, but this was not paced by new research at the scientific frontier.
Joseph Black, the discoverer of latent and specific heat, but if Watt should share credit with anybody, it would be Matthew Boulton, the entrepreneur, rather than Joseph Black, the scientist. This does not mean that there was no interplay between science and technology during this early period, nor that such contacts were not fruitful. Indeed, we have some very notable exceptions which prove the rule.
For example, the need for bleaching and dyeing textiles and for porcelain to compete with the superb imports from the Far East stimulated basic investigations in high-temperature and analytical chemistry; a virtually direct line. This view has been challenged by A. The classic examples for close relationship between science and technology in the 19th century were thermodynamics and electricity. In the former case, technology presented problems for science; in the latter, science presented potentialities for technology.
But beyond these simple connections, what were the customary relationships between science and technology, the interactions as well as the reactions? Men like Carnot and Edouard Seguin, who were responsible for primary theoretical advances in the field of thermodynamics, were engineers by profession. In his investigation of energy, James Prescott Joule always started with some specific technical problem, for example, the practical performance of an electrical motor with its production of work and heat.
There is no doubt that the engine—the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine and the electric motor—presented problems which attracted the attention of scientists, and led to theoretical developments. But—and this is perhaps the crucial point—although technological advances spurred advances in theory, the theoretical knowledge obtained with such stimuli was very slow to feed back to technology. Lynwood Bryant has shown, as a case in point, that the important steps in the development of the heat engine came from practical men not very close to theory, and the academicians, who understood the theory, did not invent the engine.
Despite this, the change from the common-sense criteria of fuel economy to a new criterion of thermal efficiency marked a step toward the domain of abstractions, of invisible things like heat and energy, and was a major development in bringing scientific technology into being. The discovery of voltaic electricity as a result of the work by Galvani and Volta in to initiated a totally new period in the relationship between science and technology. Discovered in the laboratory, electricity inspired a number of empirical experimenters and gadgeteers but it found no practical use for nearly forty years, when the electric telegraph and electroplating appeared almost simultaneously.
These applications provided an opportunity for many people of different intellectual and practical approaches to acquire experience with the new force. From our viewpoint, it should be noted that electrical science and industry both required the measurement of new properties of matter. Conductors and insulators were, of course, well known and classified. The relationship between thermal and electrical conductivity had been identified and some studies of the.
Some discussion of the role of plating in the beginning of the electric power industry will be found in C. With the transformer came studies of iron alloys in the search for lower hysteresis losses, and the science and practice never thereafter parted company. Up to this point, virtually all interest in the properties of materials was related to their mechanical properties along with reasonable resistance to corrosion. Even in the electrical areas, however, improvements and applications continued to come from the technology more than the science. Edison, the greatest electrical inventor of the century, was not schooled in electrical science and sometimes did things opposed to electrical theory.
In Kelvin, we see a man of the future, but even he did not let his theory restrain his empirical genius. Well into the 20th century, men in close practical contact with the properties of materials had a better intuitive grasp of the behavior of matter than did well-established scientists. The mutually reinforcing attitudes of mind which eventually led men to associate in MSE at first led technologists and scientists to place emphasis on different facets of the same totality of knowledge and experience.
Scientists, in the simplifications that are essential to them, must often leave out some aspect which the technologist cannot ignore, and they usually overemphasize those aspects of nature that are newly discovered. It is commonplace to ridicule outmoded theories after new viewpoints have shown their strength. Both were errors which took some years to eradicate.
Chemistry at the end of the 18th century turned away completely from the old concern with qualities and adapted a purely compositional and analytical approach to materials.
This was an approach with which something clearly worthwhile could be done, whereas properties being structure-sensitive as we now know could only be handled individually by purely ad-hoc suppositions regarding the parts or corpuscles, which the ill-fated Cartesian viewpoint had made briefly popular. From analytical chemistry came a major triumph; new quantitative concepts of elements and atoms and molecules. These remain an essential basis of MSE although the control of composition is now seen less as an end in itself as an easy or cheap way of obtaining a desired structure.
The discovery of the presence of carbon and its chemical role in steel was a great achievement of 18th-century analytical chemistry. Indeed, until that time ignorance regarding chemical composition meant that there could be. A full understanding of the changes in the properties of steel on hardening could not be reached until it was learned in — that the carbon which helped produce the fire also entered into the makeup of the steel itself.
The obvious value of this and related chemical knowledge eventually brought chemists as analysts into every large industrial establishment, but it also led to a temporary disregard of some promising earlier work on structure, which had begun by observations on the fracture appearance of bellmetal, steel, and other materials. The fracture test is extremely old and artisans to this day often judge the quality of their materials from the characteristic texture and color of broken surfaces.
He had interests ranging all the way from advanced science to traditional practice, and he carried out much of his work specifically for the purpose of reducing the cost of materials so that the common man could enjoy beautiful objects. The only scientific interest in the structure of matter at the end of the 18th century existed in the field of crystallography applied to the identification and classification of minerals. Some superb mathematics was developed around the concept of stacking among perfect crystalline polyhedra, but it failed to connect in any effective way with atomic theory, and few people even suspected that most real materials were composed of hosts of tiny imperfect crystals.
Yet these great strides in the fundamental understanding of the nature of metals and alloys occurred independently of—and indeed almost oblivious to—contemporaneous advances in practical metallurgy. While the chemistry of steel was being developed in Sweden and France, practical innovations in furnace design and operation and new methods of refining, consolidating, and. All this came about entirely without benefit of science, and yet it was a major factor in the social and economic changes referred to as the Industrial Revolution.
This he did by coking the coal, removing volatile hydrocarbons and sulphur. Charcoal was in short supply and expensive, because of previous deforestation caused both by the needs of smelting itself and to provide land for agriculture. He developed the puddling process in which coke-smelted pig iron was oxidized on a large scale in reverberatory furnaces instead of in small batches in the earlier firing hearths, and he combined this with the rolling mill to give an integrated plant for the large-scale, low-cost production of bar iron in a diversity of shapes and sizes.
This was in and it is rightly regarded as one of the chief contributors to the rapid development of industry and changing attitudes in the Industrial Revolution. In this, Josiah Wedgwood was an outstanding leader, though he undoubtedly got some inspiration from the scientific work on the continent and reports of the mass production techniques in the great Chinese factories.
But, of course, the iron and pottery industries were only one part of a much broader organic change involving marketing techniques in which Wedgwood himself was a pioneer , transportation with the expanding canal system, power becoming geographically unrestricted through the advent of the steam engine, a new sense of urbanization, and a growing middle class.
The next radical change in the iron industry was the making of low-carbon steels in the molten state. Though he implies otherwise in his autobiography 53 , Bessemer did not come to his process through a study of new chemical and physical discoveries. He happened to see the unmelted shell of a pig of cast iron that had been exposed to air while being melted in a reverbatory furnace, and this started him thinking about oxidation. The thermal aspect of his process was also not anticipated, and his first experiments on blowing air through molten cast iron were done in crucibles set into furnaces to provide enough external heat.
But, of course, he knew enough schoolboy chemistry and physics to realize the significance of what he observed, and had the energy needed to develop the process from an observation to a commercial success. His converter became almost a symbol of an age. Like Darby, however, Bessemer was also the beneficiary of a happy environmental accident. He had ordered some pig iron from a local merchant without any specification, and it just happened to be unusually low in sulphur and phosphorus.
His first licensees, using a poorer quality of iron, could not produce good steel; he bought back the contracts and employed some first-rate analytical chemists who found out what the trouble was. When added as high-carbon spiegeleisen, the ferroalloy simultaneously restored the burnt-out carbon to the level desired in the finished steel. None of these represented advanced scientific concepts at the time, yet all would have evolved far more slowly without the foundation of chemical understanding that came out of the 18th century.
The open hearth furnace was a direct result of new thermodynamic thinking, as was the related Cowper stove for efficiently heating the air for the blast furnace, although the invention of the hot blast itself had occurred in on the basis of a practical hunch. The Martin process was first simply used for melting and was advantageous in that it employed scrap, but combined with Siemens original plan to melt pig iron and ore in refining, it achieved great flexibility.
Neither the converter nor the open hearth process could remove phosphorus; although an oxidizing slag in the presence of the lime can remove phosphorus, its use was impractical until a refractory for lining the furnace could be found that would withstand the corrosive effect of such a slag at the high temperatures involved. The Thomas invention of the basic process using magnesite or dolomite solved this—and changed the industrial map of Europe.
This illustrates the intimate relationship between metallurgy and ceramics; all metallurgical processes are dependent upon the availability of materials to contain them. The 19th-century developments in metallurgy almost all aimed at the more efficient production of materials known for centuries. Chemical theory was helpful to guide improvements, and chemical analysis became essential in the control of both raw materials and processes. By the end of the 19th century, most major metallurgical works had their chemical laboratories, and it was through the analytical chemist that a scientific viewpoint found its way into the industry.
The accidental discovery of age hardening in aluminum alloys in led to the zeppelin with great psychological if not military effect in World War I and turned metallurgical thought to a new field, dispersion hardening, of great practical importance and even greater theoretical significance. Previously, the main metallurgical advances lay in the development of alloy steels.
This had become a purposeful objective at the end of the 19th century, for most earlier attempts to improve steel had involved relatively small pieces of metal for cutting tools in which only hardness and wear resistance were needed. The requirements of the automobile were the principal incentive for the large-scale development of alloy steels, but the studies of them, at first largely empirical, profoundly influenced the growing science of metals by forcing attention to the complicated structural changes that occur during heat treatment.
Changes of materials can interact with society in ever-widening and often invisible ways. The entree of alloy steels that underlay the automobile and the change in suburban life that came with it is simply one example of the process. A century earlier the whole rhythm of life had been profoundly affected by improved methods of lighting; later came the refractory thoria mantle for the incandescent gas light, which was in turn largely replaced by the incandescent electric lamp; the latter became possible after a search for filament material had yielded first carbon, then tantalum, and finally, drawn tungsten wire of controlled grain size and shape.
The incandescent lamp itself has been partly supplanted by fluorescent lamps depending on materials of quite different physics; still more recently lamps using high-pressure sodium vapor in alumina envelopes, resulting from the most advanced ceramic technology, altered the patterns of crime on city streets. The development of cutting tools as part of the background of steel technology was mentioned previously.
Tools, however, react significantly on all methods of production and even on the selection and design of whatever is being produced. For cutting operations performed by hand the traditional carbon steel, hardened by quenching and tempering, was adequate. Experiments to improve steel by alloying including some notable experiments by the eminent Faraday in showed little advantage and did not disclose the greater depth of hardening in alloy steels which today is the major reason for using them.
Tungsten had been introduced into tool steels by Robert Mushet in Its use was economical because it needed less frequent grinding, but it did not produce any drastic change in the machine-tool industry. Then, in , Taylor and White who were systematically studying the factors that affected machine-shop productivity, discovered that an enormous improvement could be derived from quenching a high tungsten steel from a very high temperature.
Such steels were able to cut at much higher temperatures than ever before and the lathe was completely redesigned to stand the higher stresses resulting from the removal of metal at a faster rate. In turn, this intensified scientific interest in sintering mechanisms, and an important new industry came into being—that of powder-metal fabrication previously only used for tungsten lamp filaments.
Yet, the consuming public sees such major advances only in the lower cost or higher precision of the final product. The age-old abrasive shaping process was revolutionized at about the same time as metal cutting.
Modern mass production of precision parts would have been quite impossible without silicon carbide and related materials for grinding wheels, and the new generation of machines that utilize them. Modern MSE, however, involves much more than metals. Perhaps the most dramatic changes in this century have been in organic materials, and for this we must return to the 19th century and the development of organic chemistry, moving from the simple inorganic molecule of Dalton into molecules of far more complicated structure. Simple atomic properties beautifully explained the composition of homologous series of compounds such as the aliphatic hydrocarbons.
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Then the fact that organic substances of the same composition could. The isomerism of tartrates and racemates was discovered by Berzelius in , and Pasteur showed, in , that when crystallized the latter gave two crystal forms that were mirror images of each other and opposite in optical activity.
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