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Most sands are silica, but if you're on a pristine white beach in Caribbean or Hawaii, you're actually sitting on parrotfish poop. The parrotfish eat corals, extract the nutrients and poop out the calcium carbonate. The whiter the beach, the higher the excreta content.
The silica content of sand determines what you can use it for. Most sand has too little silica and too many impurities to be turned into glass or silicon chips.
If you wanted to improve the lot of poor families in the developing world, what would be the most effective: cash, food, or a bag of cement. One of biggest problem for children in poor countries is intestinal parasites, which damage their health and keep them from school. If their home has a dirt floor, the barefoot villagers track parasite eggs in from the outside, where they remain undetected. Mexico tried giving families cement to pave over dirt floors - parasites dropped by 78%, diarrhea rates halved. Children did better at school, general happiness improved bc they weren't looking after sick kids all the time.
The single most impt individual in history of cement was Thomas Edison. he gets laughed at for trying to build houses and furniture out of concrete, but his bigeest contrib was the giant rotary kiln, which allowed mass production of cement.
This illustrates basic principle of industrialisation. The invention of something is impt, but the crucial innovation is the next step - fuguring out how to mass produce it.
The chemicals revn is perhaps most overlooked part of the IR, yet it is probably changed more lives than any other thing invented. Saved us from bacteria and germs, cleans our homes and work places.
In 1800, 95% of Britain's energy came from coal. At same time, France almost totally (90%) dependant on wood. This energy transition dramatically changed income per capita. By 1900 Britain was 80% richer than France.
Iron nails used to be expensive; now steel nails cost next to nothing. Steel really became useful with (a) mass production and (b) the setting of standards (which meant predictable sizes and capabilities).
Pig iron, with about 3-4% carbon is most brittle. Wrought iron, with virtually no carbon, is softest and most easily worked. In the middle is steel, with less than 2% carbon.
Henry Ford obsessed with the metallurgy of steel. he spent months testing different alloys, before plumping for titanium alloyed steel for the Model T. made his car much lighter, and so much better power-to-weight than competitors.
Today's steel is ten times stronger and corrosion resistant than what was made even 50 years ago. Material retrieved from the Titanic wreck showed that although it was made from the strongest, hardiest steels available at the time, it would never pass muster today. Too high in sulphur, too low in manganese, and prone to shatter in low temps. Used cheap wrought iron rivets rather than steel, which was also more prone to shattering. And Titanic not only one to suffer from mech weakness. WW2 Liberty ships were built in a hurry out of available steel, which turned brittle in colder waters. A few simply broke in half.
One of least appreciated stories of modern life is the huge leap in productivity from factories using electric drive motors. This alone doubled US manufacturing productivity by 1930, and then again by 1969.
On YouTube you can find a video of Robert Forestermann, a German Olympic cyclist, using a stationary bike to power a toaster for long enough to brown bread. He cycles as fast as can for 60 seconds then collapses. The bread comes out light brown.
One reason Tesla was able to make an affordable car was its choice of batteries. At the time Apple et al were trying to make thinner laptops, and were shifting away from cylindrical batteries. Suddenly there was a glut of the cylindrical ones, so Tesla was able to scoop up a lot of very cheap batteries. Even today, most Teslas run on a tray of thousands of tiny laptop batteries.
When you dig up coal, you're getting the remains of ancient forests. But where oil forms, ends up somewhere else. By far the biggest oil and gas field in world is Ghawar in the UAR. 100 million years ago, a spate of volcanic activity raising CO2 levels, which led to a massive explosion in plankton populations. Remains accumulated on seabed and were heated and compressed over millenia.
We have spent the last few centuries gradually climbing the thermodynamic ladder. Coal has about twice the energy density of wood. (In other words, the amount of energy that can be released per kg.) Kerosene has twice the energy density of coal. And higher density means you have to carry less fuel and can travel much further. Powered flight had to wait until kerosene availble for fuel.
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