Mark Miodownik (2014) Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape our Man-Made World (Houghton-Mifflin).

Mark Miodownik, a professor of materials science at University College London, has written a delightful book for the general reader on some of the everyday materials we easily take for granted. Some are very common and well known: steel, paper, cement, chocolate, plastic, glass, pottery. Some are less common: aerogel, graphene, titanium.

Personal anecdotes are woven into the story of each material, beginning with a stabbing on the London Underground in 1985. The wound was made with a razor blade, which leads Miodownik into a meditation on the nature and history of stainless steel. (Yes, the author survives the attack by jumping onto a train.)

Celluloid, the clear plastic that made the movie industry possible in the 19th and 20th centuries, is presented within a movie script. The story begins with an accidental bar room murder in San Francisco and concludes with a fire in New York that consumes an office building. Much occurs between the beginning and the end.

Tea is staple of British life that was first imported from China. Porcelain was also imported from China where it was invented during the Eastern Han Dynasty, about 2000 years ago. The process that creates porcelain was a tightly held secret in China until 1704 AD, when the King of Saxony imprisoned Frederick Bottger, an alchemist. The King told Bottger that he would remain in prison until he discovered a means of making porcelain. You will find the rest of this story on page 188.

You may prefer to drink chocolate from your parcelain cup. Did you know that “chocolatl”, the original Mesoamerican drink, was used in ceremonies and as an aphrodisiac? Or that “chocolate” translates as “bitter water”? The various sensations we experience while chocolate melts in our mouth is due to more than a few  simply processed cocoa beans.

In addition to the anecdotes, history, and uses of the materials discussed by Miodownik, there are clear descriptions of the materials at the molecular and even sub atomic levels. As the author writes, “The central idea behind materials science is that changes at these invisibly small scales impact a material’s behavior at the human scale”. This book makes this idea clear in ways that are instructive and amusing.

After reading this volume, I look at coffee cups, razors, chocolate, and many other things in a new way. Stuff Matters shows us exactly what the title says: stuff matters.