1.1 The Advanced Materials Revolution
The aforementioned quote comes from a 2006 study that focused most of all on advanced materials and their economic and social impact worldwide. The statement thus gives us a fair sense of the importance of advanced materials to man's future economic progress. Actually, advanced materials technology has been an integral part of society and its evolution for centuries. It is embodied in the extracting of coal or iron ore from the earth or creating new materials from combinations of the old, such as iron and carbon to produce steel. Less well known but extremely important were the German coal tar-based syntheticsâdyes, drugs, industrial gases, and explosivesâthat dominated the world's demand for chemicals in the last quarter of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century. Germany's chemical supremacy culminated in the industry's greatest achievement up to that point: the Haber's synthetic ammonia process (1913).1
But even before the First World War, the United States had begun its ascendance in advanced materials. It had of course by then a large and technically sophisticated iron and steel industry in Western Pennsylvania. But by the 1890s, another region had opened up a whole new world of materials. Niagara Falls, because of the cheap energy it provided, developed into the first major US industrial cluster of the 20th century, companies like Alcoa, Union Carbide, and Carborundum first turned out advanced nonferrous metals, particularly aluminum, the first nickel âsuperalloys,â and the carbide family of metals for a growing number of industrial applications. Soon chemical companies moved in to produce organic synthetics using Niagara's cheap electrical power.2
The Niagara Falls area, in industrial decline for decades, would not be the last important advanced material center. The following table displays many of the major advanced material innovations according to year of introduction, category, company, and country (and in the case of the United States, region) from the start of the First World War to the present (2016). A number of trends can be identified. As expected, structural materials continued to control advanced materials innovation until the late 1940s. Polymers (and the intermediates that went into making them) soon began to dominate. This was the age of macromolecular technology, and the two ruling powers in this field were DuPont and (surprisingly given the nature of its core business) General Electric (GE). DuPont particularlyâalong with Union Carbideâcreated a very important advanced material region in West Virginia's Kanawha Valley. Raw materials in the form of coal and natural gas furnished the raw materials. Carbide depended on the ethane-rich gas to make its ethylene-based chemicals and plastics, while DuPont, much like the Germans, opted for the coal as its basic starting point. This region would prove remarkably fertile over the years as research conducted there turned out some of the most important new materials of the age, including the most prominent of them all, nylon. But Kanawha, like Niagara, turned out not to be the last word in American advanced materials. General Electric certainly proved this: it came out with revolutionary new polymers through the 1940s and 1950s without having to dip in the Kanawha well to do so. The table also shows the growing importance of the southwest and its oil fields in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, which is where research on and early production of high octane fuel using fluid catalytic crackingâone of the most powerful advanced material processesâtook place.3
We see then that during the first half of the 20th century, American advanced materials shifted geographically from the northeast (Pittsburgh and Niagara Falls) to the south (Kanawha Valley) and southwest (Gulf States) and did so in pursuit of abundant and cheap resources, whether energy or raw materials. Beginning in the late 1950s, the center of advanced materialsânever content to stay in one place for too longâwas on the move again, this time headed due west. The reason this time was to take advantage of another type of resource involving neither cheap power nor abundant fossil fuels but the free movement of ideas and knowledge and a growing source of capitalâventure moneyâspecifically tailored for high-technology enterprises. A whole new type of advanced material now entered the scene. Whereas the metals and polymers were made by the advanced materials producers and sold to fabricators of components and structures that in turn went to the construction, transportation, textile, machine tool, and a host of other industries large and small, the semiconductor company synthesized advanced semiconductor composites and from them created actual working devicesâtransistors, memory chips, microprocessorsâthat then were sold to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), notably personal computer manufacturers. Semiconductor firms thus are active further up that value chain than are the steel and chemical companies. These functional materials began their upward ascent into history in the late 1940s with the invention of the transistor, which, along with nylon, is ranked as one of the most important inventions of the century. A whole new era now came to the fore. Today, we think of Silicon Valley as the place where money is made in the software field dominated by video games, social media, and internet services of all kinds. But Silicon Valley was created around companies like Shockley Semiconductor (defunct for decades), Fairchild Semiconductor (still with us as of 2017), and the mighty Intel (still the king of the chip). The people who powered these companies were not software designers but chemists, chemical engineers, applied physicists, and electrical engineers, and their business was materials and creating new and more sophisticated semiconductor devices. The transistor, integrated circuit and microprocessor, solid-state laser, and siliconâgermanium chip are all advanced material composites made by very intricate processes with such names as metal on oxide, silicon gate, and epitaxy. This advanced material technology which creates ever more powerful microchips is absolutely necessary before there can be software, cloud computing, or any of the ever-growing number of social media venues that populate the 21st century IT landscape. We can say then that from the 1960s Silicon Valley evolved into another major American advanced materials region.
By the late 1970s, the advanced material situation becomes a great deal more complicated. New materials innovation was now more dispersed geographically, originating not only in the United States but internationally. Within the United States itself, former technology centers revived,...
