Materials

200 inventions in this category

Materials inventions provide the physical substrate for all other technologies—you cannot build what you cannot make. Historians named entire ages after dominant materials: Stone, Bronze, Iron. Each transition required not just discovery but mastery of processing: bronze needed tin and copper smelting; steel needed blast furnaces hot enough to add carbon to iron; plastics needed petroleum refining and polymer chemistry. These inventions exhibit extreme path dependence: early choices about steel alloys still constrain modern engineering. They demonstrate niche construction at civilizational scale—bronze tools enabled mining that produced iron ore that enabled steel production. The biological parallel is biomineralization: organisms evolved shells, bones, and teeth through similar material innovations. WWII accelerated plastics adoption as substitutes for strategic materials; by the late 20th century, plastics replaced steel in countless applications.