Top 10 Moments in Material Science History PDF

The Top 10 Moments in History These are the top 10 greatest moments in material science's history, according to the voting members of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society by more than 900 survey participants. 10. The Bessemer process A process for melting iron marks the beginning of that thing...

The Top 10 Moments in History These are the top 10 greatest moments in material science's history, according to the voting members of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society by more than 900 survey participants. 10. The Bessemer process A process for melting iron marks the beginning of that thing called industrialization. In 1856, inventor Henry Bessemer patented what he referred to as, "The Manufacture of Iron Without Fuel." The process essentially involves oxygen blown through pig iron to get rid of impurities, and in the end you wind up with steel. At the time, bridges and rail tracks relied on iron, and were at high risk of collapsing. Steel was much stronger and far more reliable. 1 9. X-ray Crystallography A fundamental technique that allowed us to see what stuff was made of. Discovered in 1912, it determined the size of atoms and their chemical bonds. As one example, it allowed us to understand the function and structure of DNA. Another example: X-ray crystallography allows us to see the hexagonal symmetry of a snowflake. It is still the way that we study the atomic structure of new materials today. Si Oxygen Crystalline SiO2 Noncrystalline (amorphous) SiO2 Adapted from Fig. 3.22(a), Adapted from Fig. 3.22(b), Callister 7e. Callister 7e. 2 8. Extractive Metallurgy In 5000 BC, people living the areas of modern-day Turkey found a way to get liquid copper out of malachite and azurite, and discovered that molten metal can be cast in shapes. Basically, this is where it all starts, with this process for how we might separate raw materials, usually for more processing and refinement. There are three outputs from the process: Feed (the original raw ore), concentrate (the valuable metal), and the tailings (which are waste.) Azurite Cuprite Malachite Chalcopyrite 3  7. Crucible steel making (Wootz steel) In 300 BC, metal workers in India and Sri Lanka developed what is also known as crucible steel. Essentially they heated porous iron until very hot, then hammered it to release slag and packing it with wood chips in a clay crucible and heating that mixture until the iron absorbs the carbon from the wood. Steel is born from this process, and is then able to be heated again and formed into bars or other objects. Wootz steel (crucible steel), is the material for the famous Damascus swords with their unusual wood-grain pattern. For centuries, this sword remained the main inspiration for metallurgists and blacksmiths. 4 6. Modern Concrete In 1755, John Smeaton invented modern-day concrete, pretty much the number one construction material ever. He created this material to build the third Eddystone Lighthouse on the English Channel (the first, made of wood, got smashed by waves, and the second also of wood and iron burnt down). Smeaton needed something strong enough to endure the waves, and he needed the material to set quickly, making the 12-hour window between tides. What makes his mortar "hydraulic" is the addition of water to cement powder. Hydraulic cements can harden even underwater. But his critical observation is that the best hydraulic cements are made from a certain proportion of limestone mixed some brick powder and fine pebbles. This is the starting point for the modern use of cement and concrete. About 60 years later, another English inventor Joseph Aspdin created Portland Cement, which is the one we all know. 5 5. Optical microscopy It was developed by Anton van Leeuwenhoek around 1668, and the design of the optical microscope has pretty much remained the same since. Even though Leeuwenhoek may not have "invented" the microscope, he is officially credited with popularizing it. The oldest drawing known to have been made with a microscope is the one on bees. Gray cast iron Beach sand 6  4. Glass After ceramics, glass is the greatest non-metallic engineering material, according to The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. Volcanic glass has been naturally found and used since the Stone Age, to make sharp cutting tools. But the first man-made form is thought to come from Northern Syria but glassmaking was practiced more formally in Iran. The elements of early glass included lime, soda and silica. It was after 19th Century that glass became more of an aesthetic art form, including jewelry and sculpture. In scientific terms the word 'glass' actually refers to a wide range of materials. Basically every solid that has a non-crystalline structure, which means its atoms are not arranged in a lattice form, and can move from a brittle to a molten-like state is called a glass. 7 3. The transistor This device is considered by many to be the greatest invention of the 20th Century. John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1948. They observed that when they connected two gold point contacts to a crystal of germanium (a semiconductor similar to silicon) it produced a signal that had greater output power than its input. They were rewarded with the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. At a basic level, a transistor is a semiconductor that can amplify and "switch" electrical signals. 8 2. Smelting iron It's thought that the Egyptians were the first to smelt iron way back in 3,500 BC. This is considered to be the first trick of processing the world's greatest metallurgic material. Smelting is the process by which an metal is removed from its ore. Most of the earliest known possibilities for smelting iron ore happened in a furnace called a bloomery where the temperature is just low enough to not melt the iron itself. The process produces a spongy porous mass of iron called a bloom. It then gets hammered into a desired shape. 9  1. Periodic Table of the Elements This is material science's historic moment of extreme organization and became the number one most referenced tool for all materials' scientists and engineers. Dimitri Mendeleev created his first organization of the elements in 1869. The modern table lays out 118 elements based on their atomic number and chemical properties. Elements are represented by the number of protons in their nucleus, and this increases from one, Hydrogen, up to 94 Plutonium, the highest of the naturally occuring elements. 10 1. Periodic Table of the Elements The table has 18 columns called 'groups' and 7 rows called 'periods.‘ Periodic refers to a recurring trend and that recurrence allows one to come up with relationships between elements, as well as predict the properties of new, yet to be discovered, elements. By leaving gaps in the table for those yet-to-be-discovered elements, Mendeleev gained recognition as the inventor of the Periodic Table. He was also the first chemist to organize the elements into their "chemical families" as opposed to strictly adhering only to their atomic weights. 11 12 13