Atlas Trail
From Lodestone to Lattice: A Materials Journey
Every engineering field is really a story about what it learned to shape. This trail follows four materials, from an ancient corrosion-resistant metal too expensive for kings to a crystal lattice thinner than a human hair, through the fields that turned raw matter into machines.
Stop 1 of 4.
Materials
Aluminum: once rarer than gold because no known method could cheaply free it from ore, until the Hall-Heroult electrolytic process of 1886 cut its cost by orders of magnitude and made it the standard structural metal of aviation. Its own earlier isolation, in 1825 and 1827, is now a documented priority dispute between two chemists.
Stop 2 of 4.
Materials
Carbon Fiber: filaments a few micrometers wide, aligned and bonded into a composite that can exceed steel's tensile strength at a quarter of the weight, developed for aerospace use through the 1960s.
Stop 3 of 4.
Materials
Silicon: purified to extreme levels and grown into single crystals, its conductivity can be tuned atom by atom through doping, the base material of nearly every transistor and integrated circuit built since the 1960s.
Stop 4 of 4.
Materials
Silicon Carbide: a harder, wider-bandgap relative of silicon now taking over the power electronics silicon cannot handle, tolerating higher voltage, heat and switching speed.
Create an account to keep this trail. Saving copies its stops into a collection of your own, which you can add to, reorder and share.
Where you have got to in this trail is kept by your own browser and is never sent to us. Clearing your browser data clears it. All trails.