50 Fun Facts About Materials Science

Which one-atom-thick material did two Manchester physicists first isolate using sticky tape?

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms, and Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov first pulled it from graphite with adhesive tape in 2004.

Which fiber, five times stronger than steel by weight, did chemist Stephanie Kwolek invent?

Kevlar was first sold in the early 1970s to replace the steel in racing tires, long before it became the standard fiber of bulletproof vests.

Which material did chemist Roy Plunkett find by accident as white powder inside a gas cylinder?

Teflon, or PTFE, formed when the gas Plunkett was storing for refrigerant research polymerized inside its cylinder, leaving one of the slipperiest solids known.

Which metal, then priced like silver, forms the small pyramid capping the Washington Monument?

Aluminum stopped being a precious novelty in 1886, two years after the cap was set, when the Hall–Héroult process made it cheap enough for mass production.

Which rubber seals did Richard Feynman dunk in ice water to explain the Challenger disaster?

O-rings in the booster joints lost their springiness in the cold of launch morning, and Feynman proved it at a televised hearing with a clamp and a glass of ice water.

Which ultralight solid, nicknamed frozen smoke, did NASA's Stardust probe use to catch comet dust?

Aerogel is a gel whose liquid has been replaced with gas, leaving a solid that can be more than 99 percent air by volume.

Which source supplied the iron in Tutankhamun's dagger, made long before Egyptians smelted it?

A meteorite provided the metal, as the blade's high nickel content shows, and evidence of Egyptian iron smelting begins only some seven centuries after the burial.

Which metal, with the highest melting point of any, glows as the filament in old-style light bulbs?

Tungsten melts at 3,422 °C, which lets a filament run white-hot without turning liquid, and the same heat resistance puts it in rocket engine nozzles.

Which synthetic fiber, invented by Wallace Carothers, first went on sale as toothbrush bristles?

Nylon reached shoppers in 1938 as toothbrush bristles, before the stockings that made it famous, which sold 64 million pairs in their first year.

Which element, second most abundant in Earth's crust, is purified into wafers for computer chips?

Silicon makes up about 28 percent of the crust by mass, yet chipmakers must refine it to extreme purity before it can be sliced into wafers.

Which molten metal does glass float on in the Pilkington process for making flat window panes?

Tin stays liquid and calm at glassmaking temperatures and is denser than glass, so the hot ribbon spreads perfectly flat across its surface.

Which gemstone did General Electric learn to make in 1954 using extreme heat and crushing pressure?

Diamond first grew with commercial success in Tracy Hall's belt press that December, and synthetic stones went on to supply nearly all the diamond used in industry.

Which device, first built at Bell Labs from a sliver of germanium, replaced the vacuum tube?

The transistor grew out of 1947 experiments by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, who pressed two metal contacts onto the crystal and saw a signal come out stronger than it went in.

Which volcanic rock did Stone Age toolmakers chip into blades sharper than a steel scalpel?

Obsidian fractures to a cutting edge only about three nanometers thick, which is why it has even been made into surgical scalpel blades.

Which light metal names the rechargeable batteries honored by the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

Lithium is the least dense of all metals, and the batteries built on it made laptops, mobile phones and electric cars practical.

Which English scientist first published his law of stretching springs as a Latin anagram?

Robert Hooke announced the law in 1676 in scrambled form and waited two years before revealing the solution: the extension is proportional to the force.

Which mineral sits at the very bottom of the Mohs scale of hardness?

Talc, the mineral ground into baby powder, defines 1 on the scale Friedrich Mohs introduced in 1812, which ranks each mineral by which of the others it can scratch.

Which element, at least a tenth of the alloy, gives stainless steel its resistance to rust?

Chromium reacts with oxygen to form an invisibly thin protective film on the surface, and the film heals itself whenever it is scratched.

Which element did Charles Goodyear cook with rubber on a hot stove to invent vulcanization?

Sulfur forms cross-links between rubber's long chain molecules, making it tough and durable; before that, rubber goods went soft and sticky in the heat.

Which metal is the main ingredient of both bronze and brass, two alloys worked since ancient times?

Copper makes up roughly two thirds of typical brass and nearly nine tenths of bronze, the alloy hard enough to give an age of prehistory its name.

Which metal is the most malleable of all, a single gram of it hammering out to a full square meter?

Gold can be beaten into leaf thin enough to let light through, which is how gilders cover statues and domes with very little of it.

Which structural weakness broke up two de Havilland Comets, the first jet airliners, in mid-flight?

Metal fatigue was not fully understood at the time, and the cracks were traced to stress concentrations around square cut-outs in the fuselage.

Which American cargo vessels of World War II sometimes broke in half when cold made steel brittle?

Liberty ships suffered hull cracks that Constance Tipper of Cambridge traced to the steel itself, which lost its toughness below a critical temperature.

Which English inventor patented the converter that makes steel by blowing air through molten iron?

Henry Bessemer's blast of air, patented in 1856, burns the excess carbon out of pig iron, and it gave the world its first inexpensive way to mass-produce steel.

Which New York glassmaker launched Pyrex ovenware and later the Gorilla Glass on phone screens?

Corning supplied the cover glass for the first iPhone in 2007, a toughened sheet that grew out of its 1960s Chemcor project.

Which husband in a Nobel-winning couple names the temperature at which magnets lose their pull?

Pierre Curie tracked the change in 1895 with strong magnets and precision balances, showing that a magnet heated past a critical point loses its magnetism. For iron that point is about 770 °C.

Which plastic, the most widely produced of all, goes into milk jugs and carrier bags?

Polyethylene was discovered by accident twice: by a German chemist in 1898, and again in 1933 at Britain's ICI, in the form industry could make.

Which state of matter, first seen in a compound with two melting points, now fills flat screens?

Liquid crystal behavior puzzled Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888, when his cholesterol compound melted into a cloudy fluid at 145.5 °C and then turned clear at 178.5 °C.

Which metal was Heike Kamerlingh Onnes chilling when its electrical resistance suddenly vanished?

Mercury, frozen solid with liquid helium, lost all electrical resistance at about 4.2 kelvins in 1911, the first sighting of the effect now called superconductivity.

Which effect, first shown with crystals of quartz and cane sugar, now keeps time in wristwatches?

Piezoelectricity turns pressure into voltage and back again, so a quartz sliver in a watch can be made to vibrate exactly 32,768 times a second.

Which word describes solids such as window glass whose atoms lack a crystal's long-range order?

Amorphous comes from the Greek for without shape, and the class takes in not only glass but metallic glasses and many plastics.

Which mineral is called ruby when red, sapphire in other colors, and rates nine on the Mohs scale?

Corundum is hard enough to scratch almost every other mineral, so its gem-free variety, emery, ends up as the grit on sandpaper.

Which rare-earth element is alloyed with iron and boron in the strong magnets inside headphones?

Neodymium magnets were developed independently in 1984 by General Motors and Japan's Sumitomo Special Metals, and became the strongest permanent magnets on the market.

Which term means adding traces of phosphorus or boron to a semiconductor to tune how it conducts?

Doping at just one impurity atom per 100 million counts as light, yet such traces are how chips get their separate n-type and p-type regions.

Which term, proposed by Berzelius, names the different forms one element can take, such as ozone?

Allotropes can behave very differently: ozone, the three-atom form of oxygen, is a far stronger oxidizing agent than the two-atom gas we breathe.

Which dark plastic of early telephones and radios was the first made from synthetic ingredients?

Bakelite began as Leo Baekeland's search for a substitute for shellac, a resin that had to be gathered from the secretions of lac insects.

Which heat treatment plunges red-hot steel into water or oil, trading toughness for hardness?

Quenching in water gives the greatest hardness but risks tiny cracks, so the steel is often tempered afterwards to take away some of its brittleness.

Which property lets a metal stretch permanently under tension, as distinct from being hammered flat?

Ductility is measured by pulling a test bar until it snaps; its counterpart under compression, which lead has in abundance, is malleability.

Which architect of geodesic domes gives his name to the soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecule C60?

Buckminster Fuller never saw his namesake: he died in 1983, shortly before chemists found the cage-shaped molecule that reminded them of his domes.

Which shape-memory alloy lets a collapsed stent spring back open once it is inside an artery?

Nitinol takes its name from nickel, titanium and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, where it was discovered in 1959 during a hunt for missile nose-cone alloys.

Which father and son shared a 1915 Nobel Prize for using X-rays to map the atoms inside crystals?

The Braggs measured the spacing between sheets of atoms with an instrument the father built, and Lawrence, the son, was only 25 when the prize came.

Which forbidden energy range for electrons is wide in insulators and narrow in semiconductors?

Band gap size also sets the color of an LED, because the light it emits carries an energy close to that of the gap.

Which glass teardrops survive a hammer blow to the head but explode if the thin tail is snapped?

Prince Rupert's drops are named for Rupert of the Rhine, who brought some to England in 1660; Charles II passed them to the Royal Society to puzzle over.

Which semiconductor compound made possible the blue LED behind the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics?

Gallium nitride gave a brilliant blue that a phosphor coating partly converts to yellow, and that mix is the key to white LED lighting.

Which never-repeating solids brought Dan Shechtman ridicule and, in 2011, a Nobel Prize?

Quasicrystals so offended the textbooks that the head of Shechtman's research group asked him to leave for bringing disgrace on the team.

Which very hard phase forms when steel cools too fast for its carbon atoms to diffuse away?

Martensite is named after the German metallurgist Adolf Martens, and the change that creates it can race through the steel at more than a kilometre a second.

Which line defects in crystals, proposed in 1934 by Taylor, Orowan and Polanyi, let metals bend?

Dislocations let atoms slide over each other one row at a time, which is why real metals deform at stresses far below those a perfect crystal would need.

Which hardness test, first shown by a Swedish engineer in 1900, presses a hard ball into the metal?

Brinell testing was the first hardness test to be widely used and standardized, though the large dent it leaves can damage the piece being tested.

Which volcanic ash, named after an Italian town, let Roman harbor walls set underwater?

Pozzolana takes its name from Pozzuoli, and the piers Romans poured with it at the port of Cosa have survived more than 2,100 years in the sea.

Which composite of fine threads in plastic resin caught on in the 1950s for boats and sports cars?

Fiberglass first went into a boat in 1937, but the builder took it no further because the plastic of the day was too brittle.