Material World

October 23, 2023
“What are the physical ingredients without which civilization really would grind to a halt, and where do they actually come from?” Conway (The Summit), the economics and data editor at Sky News, sets out to answer that question in this enlightening study. He suggests that copper, iron, lithium, oil, salt, and sand form the bedrock of the modern world, noting that silica, which constitutes “the main ingredient in most sands,” is melted in furnaces to create silicon chips, and that saltpeter’s rich stores of nitrogen make the substance a valuable fertilizer. Reporting on his travels to witness the extraction and processing of the six materials, Conway describes how ore from the Chuquicamata copper mine in Chile is ground to dust and “frothed up in a special liquid solution that helps separate copper from the rest.” The nimble prose transforms chemical and industrial processes into riveting entertainment, and passages tracing how the struggle to access these materials has shaped world history fascinate. For instance, Conway explains that Hitler invaded Ukraine in 1941 to plunder the country’s bountiful iron deposits and that the Saltpeter War between Bolivia and Chile was sparked in 1879 by a dispute over control of lucrative caliche (a salt used in explosives) mines in the Atacama Desert. It’s a sweeping look at the building blocks of the industrialized world.