Voting is complete for the top 50 greatest materials moments in history as conducted by JOM, the journal of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS). The top 10 moments will be announced at the TMS 2007 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in
More than 900 professionals from the materials science community and the public at large voted online between November 1 and December 31 of last year to determine the 50 greatest materials moments. The “honorees” range from the invention of electroplating in 1805 (No. 47) to the manufacture of the earliest fired ceramics in 28,000 B.C. (No. 12). Others include creation of the first “superalloy”; crafting of the first porcelain; discovery of superconductivity; beginning of metallurgy; development of the first microchip; discovery of nanotubes; development of glass blowing; building of the first electron microscope; development of iron casting; splitting of a uranium atom; vulcanization of rubber; discovery of radioactivity. (See complete list of moments 50 through 11.)
Greatest Materials Moments in History Rankings: Moments 50 to 11
No. 50: A.A. Griffith publishes “The Phenomenon of Rupture and Flow in Solids,” which casts the problem of fracture in terms of energy balance. 1920
No. 49: Adolf Martens examines the microstructure of a hard steel alloy and finds that, unlike many inferior steels that show little coherent patterning, this steel had many varieties of patterns, especially banded regions of differently oriented microcrystals. 1890
No. 48: Richard Feynman presents “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” at a meeting of the American Physical Society. 1959
No. 47: Luigi Brugnatelli invents electroplating. 1805
No. 46: Wallace Hume Carothers, Julian Hill and other researchers patent the polymer nylon. 1935
No. 45: Henry Clifton Sorby uses light microscopy to reveal the microstructure of steel. 1863
No. 44: Paul Merica patents the addition of small amounts of aluminum to Ni-Cr alloy to create the first “superalloy.” 1926
No. 43: Leo Baekeland synthesizes the thermosetting hard plastic Bakelite. 1909
No. 42: Potters in
No. 41: Kammerlingh Omnes discovers superconductivity while studying pure metals at very low temperatures. 1911
No. 40: Friedrich Wöhler isolates elemental aluminum. 1827
No. 39: The earliest form of metallurgy begins with the decorative hammering of copper by
No. 38: Jack Kilby integrates capacitors, resistors, diodes and transistors into a single germanium monolithic integrated circuit or “microchip.” 1958
No. 37: Alfred Nobel patents dynamite. 1867
No. 36: Sumio Iijima discovers nanotubes, carbon atoms arranged in tubular structures. 1991
No. 35: Russell Ohl, George Southworth, Jack Scaff and Henry Theuerer discover the existence of p- and n-type regions in silicon. 1939
No. 34: Hermann Staudinger publishes work that states that polymers are long chains of short repeating molecular units linked by covalent bonds. 1920
No. 33: Abraham Darby I discovers that coke can effectively replace charcoal in a blast furnace for iron smelting. 1709
No. 32: Sir Humphry Davy develops the process of electrolysis to separate elemental metals from salts, including potassium, calcium, strontium, barium and magnesium. 1807
No. 31: Glass blowing is developed, probably somewhere in the region of modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel — most likely by Phoenicians. (estimated) 100 BC
No. 30: Georgius Agricola publishes De Re Metallica. 1556
No. 29: Metal workers in the Near East develop the art of lost-wax casting. (estimated) 1500 BC
No. 28: Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska build the first transmission electron microscope. 1933
No. 27: Leon Guillet develops the alloying compositions of the first stainless steels. 1904
No. 26: Cambridge Instruments introduces a commercial scanning electron microscope. 1965
No. 25: Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult independently and simultaneously discover the electrolytic reduction of alumina into aluminum. 1886
No. 24: Chinese metal workers develop iron casting. (estimated) 200 BC
No. 23: Egon Orowan, Michael Polyani and G.I. Taylor, in three independent papers, propose that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations. 1934
No. 22: Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann find that they can split the nucleus of a uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons. 1939
No. 21: Augustin Cauchy presents his theory of stress and strain to the French Academy of Sciences. 1822
No. 20: Niels Bohr publishes his model of atomic structure. 1913
No. 19: Johannes Gutenberg devises a lead-tin-antimony alloy to cast in copper alloy molds to produce large and precise quantities of the type required by his printing press. 1450
No. 18: Metal workers in the region of modern Syria and Turkey discover that addition of tin ore to copper ore before smelting produces bronze. (estimated) 3000 BC
No. 17: Werner Heisenberg develops matrix mechanics, and Erwin Schrödinger invents wave mechanics and the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation for atoms. 1925
No. 16: William Roberts-Austen develops the phase diagram for iron and carbon. 1898
No. 15: Charles Goodyear invents the vulcanization of rubber. 1844
No. 14: Pierre and Marie Curie discover radioactivity. 1896
No. 13: Iron smiths forge and erect a 7-meter-high iron pillar in Delhi, India. (estimated) 400
No. 12: The earliest fired ceramics — in the form of animal and human figurines, slabs and balls — (found at sites in the Pavlov Hills of Moravia) are manufactured starting about this time. (estimated) 28,000 BC
No. 11: J. Willard Gibbs publishes the first part of the two-part paper “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances.” 1876