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Title: The Substance of Civilization
Subtitle: Materials and Human History from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon
Author: Stephen L. Sass
Narrator: John Haag
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
Language: English
Release date: 02-23-13
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 22 votes
Genres: History, World
Publisher's Summary:
The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires. How would history have unfolded without glass, paper, steel, cement, or gunpowder?
The impulse to master the properties of our material world and to invent new substances has remained unchanged from the dawn of time; it has guided and shaped the course of history. Sass shows us how substances and civilizations have evolved together. In antiquity, iron was considered more precious than gold. The celluloid used in movie film had its origins in the search for a substitute for ivory billiard balls. The same clay used in the pottery of antiquity has its uses in todays computer chips.
Moving from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon, from the days of prehistoric survival to the cutting edge of nanotechnology, this fascinating and accessible book connects the worlds of minerals and molecules to the sweep of human history, and shows what materials will dominate the century ahead.
Editorial Reviews:
The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age: there's a reason epochs were named after these substances. Their use powered the rise (and fall) of civilizations - as it turns out, substances are at the very core of human history. The typically unacknowledged story of substances and their power to shape the destiny of nations is engagingly told in Cornell professor of materials science and engineering Stephen L. Sass' The Substance of Civilization: Materials and Human History From the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon. Performed personably by voice actor John Haag, this audiobook combines academic knowledge with skilled storytelling to produce a highly entertaining look at the science of materials.
Members Reviews:
melts at a relatively low temperature making it relatively easy to pour into molds
Light and Interesting introduction to the historical technologies behind metals, glass, plastics, and other materials.
The exposition was generally non-technical with a strong emphasis on how these materials influenced people's lives. It is studded with quotations, many from the Bible and other ancient sources, illustrating the roles metals and other substances played in the lives of people in the past.
I am very grateful for a clear and lively account of the development of iron and steel, in particular. I hadn't understood, until I read this book, that cast iron is a form of iron that though brittle when hard, melts at a relatively low temperature making it relatively easy to pour into molds. The development of furnaces capable of melting steel is a very recent development.
I would have liked to see more semi-technical information on the physics of these materials and the chemistry of how they were produced and extracted. There were a handful of figures but there weren't enough of them and the ones that did exist weren't very clear in the Kindle edition.
I recommend this book to anyone who wonder how the civilization we have, came to be, and why it developed the way it did
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned a lot from reading it.
