Bottleneck Science
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The Materials Gateway
www.mrs.org POSTERMINARIES
Bottleneck Science If you read this column regularly, you may soon notice a theme to this year’s offerings. I am taking a look at different ways that materials science can be described. I am still in search of a short, universally understandable description for use on airplanes, at cocktail parties, and (in this postmodern age) in chat rooms. And you can tell that I am not really a chat room person. Given all the possibilities, who would shroud their webby anonymity in the guise of a middle-aged, white male materials scientist? Still, once it is out there, you always have to explain it—the materials science bit, I mean; the rest is usually understood. When I was an undergraduate student, one rather jaded instructor suggested that materials science has always been, and will always be, the great technological bottleneck. His position was that most if not all technological concepts are prevented from instant realization by the lack of the necessary materials, so the development of new materials is the rate-limiting step in technological advancement. Intoxicated by his own sudden insight, and probably enjoying the pleasure of a captive audience, he went so far as to suggest that the “messy and inefficient” age of steam-powered rail transport, however revered and romanticized, was purely a product of the lack of sufficient copper to make electric trains. Well, that does not quite check out. The world’s first commercial steam passenger train service was established between Liverpool and Manchester, England, in 1831. George Stephenson powered his famous “Rocket” locomotive using an engine design adapted from the static steam engines that had been in commercial use since the 1690s, the first use of those steam engines having been to pump water out of mines to increase the production of copper. At the time of Stephenson’s Rocket, electric motors were not even a
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bench-top curiosity, and are generally believed to have been invented in about 1832, by Michael Faraday. Just too late to save us from the awful age of steam locomotion! The limiting step was not the production of copper wire, but the inspiration of genius. (Incidentally, Faraday made his living as a metallurgist, in between making all of his stunning electrical discoveries. From this perspective, you can make a case that materials science enabled all of electrical engineering.) But do not believe everything those college instructors tell you—and always remember that they just do not reckon on you actually checking the facts.
“. . . the thinking of . modern inventors seems to be constrained within a box made of the . available materials . . .” Necessity is still the mother of invention, though, and there are many materials that have been invented in response to a particular need. A barrier to the improvement of small clocks and watches in the 1840s was the inconsistent quality of the steel used for the balance spring, which has the same function in a small timepiece that a pendulum has in a larger mechanical c
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