From Fired Clay to Graphene: The Long History of Making Materials

Ceramics: fired clay, the first material humans transformed with fire, dated as far back as roughly 25,000 BCE, long before anyone learned to free a metal from its ore.

Smelting: heating ore with a reducing agent such as charcoal to draw off its oxygen and free the metal within, the method behind the Bronze Age and Iron Age alike, practiced from around 5000 BCE.

Bronze: copper alloyed with roughly ten percent tin, harder and more castable than either metal alone, giving its name to the age it defined from around 3300 BCE.

Wrought Iron: hammered and rolled to squeeze out slag, tougher and more ductile than brittle cast iron, the primary structural iron from antiquity until steel displaced it in the nineteenth century.

Cement: Joseph Aspdin's 1824 patent for Portland cement, made by firing limestone and clay into clinker, now the most widely manufactured material on Earth by mass.

Semiconductor Doping: introducing controlled impurities into silicon in 1947 to create the n-type and p-type junctions that make transistors possible.

Materials Engineering: the discipline, named around 1958, that studies how a material's structure and processing shape its properties, the formal study behind everything on this trail.

Graphene: a single atom-thick sheet of carbon isolated as a stable material in 2004, the strongest material yet measured relative to its weight.