From Lodestone to Lattice: A Materials Journey

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.

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.

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.

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.

A nickel-titanium alloy found at the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory in the early 1960s, nitinol remembers a trained shape and snaps back to it when warmed, now the material behind self-expanding stents and bend-proof eyeglass frames.

Ti-6Al-4V blends titanium with aluminum and vanadium, keeping titanium's strength and light weight while adding heat treatability, carrying it into airframes, jet engines and joint implants.

A wide-bandgap semiconductor that made bright blue and white LEDs possible, gallium nitride now does a second job in fast phone chargers and electric-vehicle power electronics.

The strongest commercially available permanent magnet, discovered independently by General Motors and Sumitomo in 1984, guarded against its own tendency to corrode by a nickel coating.

The aromatic-polyamide family that gave the world Nomex and Kevlar, aramid fiber competes with polyethylene fibers like Dyneema in body armor and reinforces tires and hoses.

Long before vulcanization, Mesoamerican cultures were already tapping the Hevea tree: the Olmec were first to mold its latex into balls for the ballgame that gives natural rubber its deepest known history.