Stuff: A Horizon Guide to Materials

The buildings we live in,

the roads we drive on...

..the phones we speak into,

the screens we watch at night.

Our world is made up of materials.

They are the framework, the stuff of modern life.

Discovering and exploiting the materials that make up our planet

has been one of the most enduring quests of science

and helped us build the modern world.

Learning how to manipulate these materials

can be the making of both scientific reputations and potential fortunes.

For over 40 years, Horizon and the BBC has followed

science's bid to reveal and conquer the material world.

Charting the discovery of new materials...

We can see it and work with it,

and that was really the moment of high excitement for me.

..and proposing radical new uses for old favourites.

Super connectivity is beyond question

the most significant technological innovation

since the invention of the wheel.

Each new discovery offers a tantalising glimpse

of the Holy Grail of material science -

finding a material that's cheap to manufacture

which has the potential to change our world.

ROBOTIC VOICE: Go left onto the A3095.

And a series of extraordinary breakthroughs have done just that.

From superconductors to the silicon revolution,

materials have changed everything.

In 1990, an extraordinary new material hit the headlines.

This laser burns through half an inch of steel in a fraction of a second.

Few substances can survive such blasts of energy.

If the claims of this former hairdresser are true,

he holds the secret to a formulation that appears to defy science.

He calls his invention Starlite.

Maurice Ward was an amateur scientist,

yet he claimed to have invented an astonishing new plastic.

This torch here is producing a temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius.

Try cooking an ordinary egg like that

and in a very few seconds, the results would be quite an explosion.

I'm going to leave this torch here blowing on this egg

for a couple of minutes before we crack it open

and it ought to survive the inferno,

because it's coated with a remarkable new plastic...

Its heat-resistant properties

apparently outstripped any known material.

-So how is it doing?

-It hasn't broken up at all.

And you can see on the front, it's glowing red hot. Watch this.

If I turn the flame off,

and remember it was producing 1,200 degrees Celsius,

and I take the charred bit and I put it flat in the palm of my hand,

it only just feels warm.

And if I then crack it open, what's more...

..the egg hasn't even begun to start cooking.

The scientific community was intrigued.

We have heard so much about you.

We have seen films of you torching the egg.

In tests at the British Atomic Weapons Establishment,

Starlite even withstood blasts of over 900 kilotonnes,

more than 75 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb.

So much power is being reflected off the surface of the Starlite,

it has actually blown up the thermal fuse

and switched the interlock system of the laser down.

It looked like Ward's new material had huge commercial potential...

..and he was determined to protect his incredible find.

No. We don't supply you the formulation.

Yes. Yeah. If we give the world the formulation, that's exit us.

Despite huge interest from big business and even NASA,

Ward refused to let any samples of Starlite out of his sight

or reveal any information about it.

All we are saying really is that I'm protecting my material,

and you ain't going to pinch it.

In 2011, he died, having neither made his fortune

nor diverged the formula of his plastic to anyone outside his family.

In many ways, Starlite epitomises the cutthroat world of materials.

A world where scientists search relentlessly

for ways of exploiting a new substance and big business watches,

waiting for signs of a breakthrough,

but if that breakthrough doesn't happen,

the spotlight sweeps on and one man's career-defining breakthrough

becomes yesterday's news.

Discovering new materials can be costly.

Even a man-made substance like plastic is derived from the earth's natural resources

and that means the expense of drilling for oil

or mining underground.

The lure for business is in finding the killer application.

One that can turn a material from an intriguing oddity

to a hot commodity almost overnight.

And sometimes, that happens with materials

we've known about for years.

This film is the story of a metal.

A metal which, for 150 years,

since its discovery at the end of the 18th century, was virtually unused.

Now, this metal is being dug and blasted from the earth

at such a rapidly increasing rate

that all known reserves could well be exhausted before the year 2000.

This is the story of uranium.

For decades, uranium had little value,

but the discovery that it was radioactive

was the key to unlocking its ultimate use...

..nuclear power.

Uranium doesn't have much of a past and it may well

not have much of a future,

but its present is to be the most sought-after

and most politicised commodity of the last decades of the 20th century.

For the last 25 years,

uranium has been the fuel of the world's nuclear reactors.

The fuel which is now expected to satisfy

a growing proportion of our energy needs.

And this is what all that effort is about.

And unremarkable bronze grey metal which for 40 years now,

we've known to have properties that make it unique.

During the 1970s, it was thought that nuclear power

would eventually supply more than half the world's electricity.

And the assumption that uranium reserves were limited

only added to its value.

A stampede of prospectors headed for the planet's

most remote locations in search of fresh uranium fields.

The uranium Klondike of the 1980s is in northern Saskatchewan, Canada.

The uranium that was known to occur around Uranium City

it's now suggested may extend over the whole of a geological feature

called the Athabasca basin.

This is the sort of country where you may stumble upon a boulder

made up of 50% uranium.

Do you want to come over and take a look at this?

I think we've got ourselves a bonus boulder.

It puts this enormous deposit in perspective and is a measure of the uranium problem

to realise that in the 1990s,

we'll have to find and mine a new Athabasca Basin every two years.

But more than 30 years later, new deposits are still being discovered

and uranium prices have fallen in real terms.

The idea that there's money to be made has often fuelled

a boom or bust gold rush for new finds,

but such obsessions are nothing new.

200-odd years ago, aluminium was actually rarer than uranium

and the Emperor Napoleon had an aluminium dinner set made.

So valuable was it, he was the only one allowed to use it

and his guests were forced to make do with plates of silver and gold.

Nowadays, most of us occasionally have an aluminium dinner set

and when we've finished with it, we throw it away.

Each time an idea for a potentially valuable material appears,

both science and industry get excited.

In 1978, it was the turn of something called manganese nodules.

Take a fair-sized ship

almost anywhere in the north-east Pacific Ocean.

Drop overboard a television camera

on the end of five kilometres of cable and you will see,

as these German technicians are seeing, mile upon mile

of small, round black things

scattered across the deep ocean floor.

They are manganese nodules, and they are infinitely more interesting

than they look at first sight.

What you are looking at is one small corner of a magic carpet

whose cash value has been estimated at ten million million dollars.

Manganese nodules are fascinating to scientists,

who cannot completely explain what they are and where they come from.

Manganese nodules are tempting to industrialists,

who need the valuable copper and nickel in them.

The past and the future of these humble blackish stones, then,

is of absolutely vital interest to the world.

The lure of rich profits prompted industrialists to pour money

into identifying the best nodule fields.

This computer can actually draw a contour map of the metal percentage

of a field of nodules,

but the information is destined to help the next boardroom decision.

Oceanographers may never see it.

But harvesting the nodules was just the first step.

Scientists still had to work out a way to extract the valuable minerals

once they'd brought them up from the sea bed.

RINGING

As much as success at sea,

profitability depends on the tricky chemistry of turning dull, grey grit

into shining and valuable metal.

The basis of the process is to leach out the metals with ammonia,

but with an extremely clever pre-treatment process.

The capital cost of a full-size plant is thought to be 340 million dollars,

another 220 million capital for the ocean mining system.

Annual income - 250 million dollars from sale of the copper, nickel and cobalt.

Assuming 48% tax, total profits from a 25-year project

have been estimated as one-and-a-half thousand million dollars.

Millions were ploughed into developing the industrial process

needed to exploit the manganese nodules.

But the huge investment bore little fruit.

Within a few years, a cheaper source of nickel

had been discovered on land, and the nodules lost their allure.

In their continuing pursuit of profitable materials,

scientists began to look even further afield.

CONTROL TOWER: Go for landing.

Eagle, Houston here. Go for landing. Over.

The six Apollo missions had brought back several hundred kilograms

of moon rock for scientific analysis.

Tests revealed that the rock contained a fuel

that could be used in fusion energy,

thought to be the future of electricity production here on Earth

and a resource potentially worth billions of dollars a tonne.

The twelfth and final man to walk on the surface of the moon

became obsessed with an extraordinary idea - mining it.

Harrison Schmidt was the only research scientist

among the 12 Apollo astronauts.

-This boulder is typical of the granitic rocks that form the core...

-He's a trained geologist.

Probably an intrusive rock,

although it's sometimes very difficult to tell.

'See if I can't grab the corner and get that contact.

'It's obviously very, very cohesive,

'and fragmental-like.'

Schmidt came back from the moon and analysed samples he'd collected.

He found they contained significant quantities of helium 3.

We have significant information about the distribution of helium 3.

We of course sampled the soils

at Tranquillity Base, where Neil Armstrong landed.

We have indications of high titanium,

which is a surrogate for helium 3,

and then also, the polar regions

have high concentrations there,

so we have a pretty good basic understanding of where it is.

Helium 3 is a gas ejected from the surface of the sun...

..and blown through space by solar winds.

When it reaches the Earth, it's blocked by the atmosphere.

But on the moon, where there's nothing to block it,

the gas is trapped by the lunar soil.

Slowly, over billions of years, huge deposits have built up.

At first blush, using the most conservative figures

for the amount of helium 3 that's in the soils of the moon,

what we call the regolith of the moon,

there's about a million tonnes.

That's a lot of helium!

It would be enough to power the Earth for hundreds of years.

It's only within the last few decades that we've ever

thought about the moon as being a large source of energy.

In fact, it may be the Persian Gulf of the 21st century.

It seems preposterous, but Schmidt and Kulcinski

have set up a company with the extraordinary idea

of strip mining the moon and transporting helium 3

as a liquefied gas a quarter of a million miles back to Earth.

It's not a madman's dream to go to the moon and access these resources.

We've been there, we know how to do it, we can estimate the cost.

That's not a madman's dream.

While it may be technically possible,

the economics of mining the moon remain prohibitive.

For now, Harrison Schmidt's dream remains in the realms of fantasy.

Back on Earth, scientists have been constant in their quest

not just to exploit the raw materials around us,

but to understand them as well, and if the key to progress

lies in manipulating materials, then we must know what gives them

their distinctive properties,

like clay - squishy, malleable.

Iron - hard as.

Through intriguing experiments and testing things to destruction,

scientists gradually learned more about the nature of materials.

It's a compact, almost claustrophobic world

and the men working in it are, perhaps have to be,

total enthusiasts.

But to understand them fully,

they needed to find a way of peering inside.

In the 1970s, a new generation of technology changed

materials research by allowing scientists to scrutinise them in far greater detail.

They're helped by pictures produced by this machine.

It's a scanning electron microscope

and it can be used to study

the internal structure of, for example, this specimen,

something which, to the naked eye,

looks like a tiny fragment of unfired pottery.

The sample is enclosed in the inspection chamber,

which is sealed so that it can be pumped down to a vacuum.

The fragment will then be scanned by an electron beam

to produce an image of the exposed surface, which is projected like a television picture.

New imaging technology vastly improved our understanding of materials.

Deeper insight enabled scientists to manipulate substances

and push them to new capabilities,

such as creating a metal that behaved like a plastic,

a super-plastic metal.

Here, a foot-square panel of metal is being heated

and it'll be blown up by air pressure.

Pressure is now coming on.

An ordinary soft metal would already be thinning, ready to burst.

Vacuum on.

Stage two, it's now being sucked down into the box

and still without any sign of bursting.

This metal's an alloy of seven parts of zinc to two of aluminium,

but it's not the composition that's important.

It's the crystalline structure inside the metal which, in some way,

makes it behave like bubblegum, which allows it to get thinner

and thinner, the metal spreading and extending evenly.

This behaviour is now totally unlike that of a metal,

even of a soft, hot metal.

What is it in the metal that causes it to behave like this?

Nobody really knows, though it must be something to do with the abnormally

small size of the crystal grains that are found in super-plastic metals.

They're 100 times smaller than those in ordinary metal.

They seem to move over each other as easily as grains of sand,

but if you can press a pulley wheel in metal

as easily as if it were made of plastic, you're onto a winner.

These unusual new materials sometimes turned out

to have unanticipated commercial benefits.

A material doesn't have to be brand new to be surprising.

Sometimes, it's just a matter of looking at

a familiar substance in a different way.

As simple a process as altering something's temperature

can radically change its properties,

and it was by cooling a metal that researchers made one of the biggest

discoveries in material science - the discovery of super conductivity.

This magnet's strength comes from

an electric current

that will run forever without any source of power.

The phenomenon - zero electrical resistance, super conductivity.

Super conductivity is beyond question the most significant

technological innovation since the invention of the wheel.

Now, that may sound facetious, but if you think of it,

I think the statement can be defended.

The wheel provided us with frictionless transport of matter,

and super conductivity provides us

with frictionless transport of electricity.

Super conductors proved to be extraordinary materials.

They behave normally at room temperature,

but when they're made very cold,

their properties change.

At temperatures lower than minus 140 degrees Celsius,

they emit a powerful magnetic force,

and they also conduct electricity almost perfectly.

Scientists were convinced that they were on the brink

of a great leap for progress.

I wanted to say I did something with my life,

and when this thing came,

for me, it was my chance

to really try and make an impact on things.

I had the feeling that we were very close to a breakthrough,

so I could enjoy my beer in the evening.

Scientists thought that super conducting transmission lines

could revolutionise our power supply.

Conventional cables lose around 10% of the electricity

they carry because of resistance,

the natural opposition a material poses to the passage of electrons.

Zero resistance in a super conducting wire

would mean no loss of energy.

Niobium titanium rods are packed into copper canisters,

and these are then drawn down to long thin rods,

rather like making Blackpool rock.

As well as transforming energy, super conducting engines

could power our battleships, and their strong magnetic fields

could give medical science new ways to look inside our bodies.

It's something like an X-ray, but far more effective,

and also much less damaging to the patient.

Some scientists even thought they could revolutionise

our transport systems by using superconductors to power a train.

At the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology,

they're developing something that could literally help superconductivity take off.

A train filled with liquid helium

that flies on superconducting magnets.

This is a 25th scale model, built to demonstrate electromagnetic flight.

This Magneplane vehicle contains

three saddle-shaped superconducting magnets

and another one is here.

And a third one...

As long as the test vehicle was kept cold enough,

it could sustain a magnetic field that would lift it

and hold it up off the track.

It's not enough to lift the vehicle,

we also need to propel it to move it along.

For this purpose,

we have wires across the centre of this guideway which form meanders...

These wires could create magnetic waves to push the vehicle along.

What looked like a fantasy in 1974 became a reality within ten years

when the first Maglev trains broke all the records.

Here, the superconducting magnets, cooled by liquid helium,

are in the experimental train.

As it gathers speed, they lift it off the track.

It's not the only Maglev train in the world,

but this Japanese superconducting prototype is certainly the fastest.

In fact, it's claimed a world record 321 mph.

Although superconductivity grabbed the world's attention,

it was received with a note of realism.

For the products of superconductivity to become real,

it must bridge the gap from the laboratory to the marketplace.

It must make the transition

from a scientific phenomenon to an everyday reality.

From a specialty item to a commodity.

Today, superconductors do have some specialist applications.

1,600 of them power the large Hadron Collider.

But the extremely low temperatures they need to function

means they've not yet bridged that gap to commodity status.

Greater insight into the internal structure of materials

enabled us to manipulate them as never before.

But the ultimate proof that scientists could understand them

right down at the atomic level would only come

if they could recreate that structure in the lab.

And what more desirable a material to recreate than diamond!

# The French are glad to die for love... #

The brilliance of a diamond is what makes it so highly prized.

But scientists love it because of its amazing properties.

As well as being the hardest known naturally occurring material,

it is the most transparent and least compressible.

# ..Jewels

# A kiss of the hand may be quite continental

# But diamonds are a girl's best friend... #

The idea of creating Earth's hardest substance in a laboratory seemed incredible.

But in 1955, scientists at General Electric in the USA did just that.

Using an ultra-high pressure and high temperature machine,

they transformed a mixture of metal and carbon into diamond.

The stones were perfect

for industrial applications like cutting and polishing.

But their small size and lack of sparkle

gave them little appeal to the gem business.

Over time, the process was refined,

yet one thing still set synthetic diamonds apart.

Their colour.

Any synthetic diamond you grow

will have a lot of nitrogen in the structure.

This nitrogen is incorporated

into single substitutional nitrogen atoms.

Isolated nitrogen atoms dotted around the diamond lattice.

The consequence of having nitrogen there is that it gives the diamond

a not very attractive brown colour.

In 2000, Horizon visited a Russian researcher

who claimed to have solved the mystery

of making perfectly clear synthetic diamonds.

To get colourless diamonds,

what we had to do was get rid of the nitrogen,

which gives them the yellow colour.

A clue for getting rid of the nitrogen

came from an American experiment 20 years before.

It suggested that the nitrogen atoms could be chemically attracted away

from a growing diamond by using a nitrogen 'getter'.

The nitrogen 'getter' Fiegelson chose was aluminium.

Fiegelson found that by putting aluminium in the growth cell,

it melted into the metal solvent

and the nitrogen atoms were irresistibly drawn towards it,

leaving the carbon atoms free to form as pure and colourless diamond.

When we got our first good diamonds, we were absolutely overwhelmed.

They have the same characteristics as real diamonds.

The same hardness, same conductivity, the same sparkle.

Although he can't make many,

his diamonds can now be both clear and colourless.

Within a short time, synthetic stones like these

posed a serious threat to the diamond industry.

One of the major players, De Beers,

was determined to find a way of protecting their valuable material.

So, at a discreet facility

on the outskirts of London,

De Beers created the Gem Defensive Program.

At vast cost, the new scientific division was set up

to develop techniques to distinguish between natural and synthetic diamonds.

Clearly, we knew that some day, synthetic gems

would be made available on the consumer market.

The crucial thing for us was to make sure that first, the industry,

but more importantly, the consumer,

had every means possible to ensure we could detect

the synthetic from the genuine article.

The problem they faced

was that synthetics were now very high quality.

It forced them to study down to the diamond's atomic structure

to detect even the tiniest differences.

De Beers developed a machine that used ultraviolet light

to reveal the difference between natural and synthetic diamonds.

Under ultraviolet light,

both natural and synthetic diamonds will glow to some degree.

This is called fluorescence.

But it is the patterns that are revealed by this glowing fluorescence

that can tell the two apart.

It's immediately obvious

from the strong blocky, blue fluorescence patterns

that this is a synthetic.

You wouldn't get these strong shapes of blue fluorescence from a natural.

Under the UV light, natural diamonds look very different,

producing a consistent, yet very faint blue glow.

De Beers are confident in the ability of their equipment

to detect these new colourless diamonds

and have sent their detection kit to gem labs around the world.

But the question is,

will that be enough to protect them in the long run?

As it turns out,

synthetic diamonds have never become as popular as the natural form.

Once material scientists found a way

of definitively identifying natural diamonds,

consumers opted for the genuine article,

proving that science can't always determine

whether a material will have value.

Diamond is a material made of pure carbon.

And surprisingly, it is not the only one.

Graphite, used in pencils, is also a pure carbon crystal.

Scientists believed that these were the only two naturally occurring forms,

until 1992, when they were stunned to find a third type.

And it was found by accident.

This story of discovery and revolution in chemistry

begins with astronomy.

The death of stars and the birth of planets.

Dying stars are pumping out carbon atoms into the interstellar medium.

The carbon in our body originated in space.

We now know that it was ejected from some star a long, long time ago

and was reprocessed and ended up on the Earth's biosphere.

What's absolutely fascinating and certainly something that excited me

when I first discovered it is that every one of us is made of carbon

and therefore, every one of us is made of stardust.

Ten years ago, Harry Kroto was studying stardust.

One thing we're not so sure about is, what is the form of that dust?

What's the structure?

How does the carbon nucleate to form these little wodges that go on to grow into planets?

Harry Kroto thought if he could create his own stardust here on Earth,

he might be able to learn more about its carbon structure

and even work out how planets formed.

He wanted to vaporise pieces of graphite

and then watch how the atoms came together.

So when he was granted access to a high-powered laser in Texas,

he jumped at the chance.

I was so excited, I pinched some money out of my wife's bank account,

got the cheapest ticket I could, and was there within three days.

I was keen on doing the experiment myself.

I was absolutely over the moon that I could do it.

What followed, none of them will forget.

Harry worked with the students,

doing run after run of graphite vaporised by laser.

It was practical, creative science at its best.

They saw evidence of Harry's long chains of carbon atoms captured fleetingly by the laser.

They also saw something else.

Harry Kroto and his team

repeatedly noticed clusters of 60 carbon atoms.

Again and again, 60 was the cluster that carbon preferred.

Why did carbon atoms form such a stable cluster?

What was special about the magic number 60?

The team tried to imagine what 60 carbon atoms would look like

if they were in a stable structure.

After trying every possible combination,

they settled on one shape that seemed to work.

It looked like they had discovered a new form of carbon.

One that was round.

The team turned to mathematicians for help.

We couldn't be the first people in the universe

to have discovered this structure.

They ought to know about the mathematics department.

So I called up Bill Beech and said,

"Sorry to bother you,

"but we have this hot new structure for a carbon molecule

"and it has 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.

"I wonder if you could bother asking one of you students

"to find out what this polyhedral object is and give us a call back."

He did call back.

Bob Curl answered the phone and the mathematics chairman said,

"I could explain this to you in a number of ways,

"but what you've got there is a soccer ball."

You can imagine this excitement that you've discovered

a way of putting 60 carbon atoms together

and it turns out not only to be beautifully symmetric, but it's a soccer ball too!

Their paper to 'Nature' was a front cover story.

A really beautiful picture of C60.

It almost looks like you are looking at stars in the sky.

It was just such a fantastic moment.

But as I took the plane back, I was on such a high that I don't think...

I think the aeroplane would have flown without the engines running.

They named their structure Buckminster Fullerene.

Bucky Balls.

But Bucky Balls was still only a theory.

To prove C-60 existed as more than a blip on a graph,

they needed to synthesise it in the lab.

Rival research teams raced to be the first

to create this new form of carbon.

The most promising lead was a red solution of graphite soot.

But although the machines reported that C-60 was present,

nobody could see it.

Then, two physicists came up with a disarmingly simple answer.

The way it really happened was, Kratschmer called me from Germany

and said, "If you just take a little vial of the red material

"and you put a drop of it on a microscope slide,

"then you'll see an incredibly beautiful sight."

So I reproduced the experiment

by putting a tiny drop of the red liquid on the microscope slide.

And in just a very few seconds, as a matter of fact,

I was able to see these beautiful little crystals,

which were hexagonal platelets of brownish, orange colour.

'No longer fleeting atoms in a laser,

'not merely in red solution, now a new solid, pure carbon crystals.'

We realised by this time that we were surely seeing a crystalline form

of carbon 60, which was really a genuinely new form of carbon

and that we were probably the first people on Earth ever to even see this.

'This is the first ever film of a new carbon, Bucky Balls crystallising before your eyes.'

As a solid states physicist, it was incredibly nice to be able to say "Ah-ha!

"Now we've got something that we can really begin to experiment with.

"We can see it and work with it." And that was the moment of high excitement for me.

Don Huffman wasn't the only one who was excited.

C-60 was a promising new material.

It seemed everyone wanted to work with it.

Hello. My name is Don Cox. I am currently the project leader...

Hello. My name is Sergio Goran. I prepare and characterise southern containing fuellerene crystals...

I'm Mons Toman and I'm exploring the uses of fuellerenes...

I'm Ravio Parsni and I'm involved in synthesis and characterisation...

I'm Bill Shriver. I study the selectivity of fuellerene reactions...

I'm Lon Chen. We're working on the functionisation chemistry of C-60...

I'm Glen Miller and I'm studying the reactivity and structure of...

One of our interests is to see what it is you can do with C-60

once you make it behave differently than it does as a pure material.

We'd love to be the company that finds a way of putting a fuellerene

into a can of oil that will improve the performance of engine oils.

Scientists proposed a wide range of uses for C-60.

From targeting medicines in the body to acting as electrical conductors in microcircuits.

But 25 years later, they're still looking for the ultimate money-spinning application.

In material science, what counts is not just coming up with

the right use,

but finding a cost-effective way of realising it too.

Since the discovery of Bucky Balls, other even more intriguing forms of carbon have been found.

The latest to excite both the scientific and business communities is graphine.

It has incredible properties. It's the thinnest material ever known,

it's more conductive than copper and stronger than diamond,

meaning it could have huge potential in the electronics and computer industries.

Graphine really could be the next big thing, but it's still too early to tell.

It may even go on to join a small number of materials that have come to represent entire eras,

like the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

When we look back, we could well regard the 20th century as the Silicon Age.

Silicon was first isolated nearly two centuries ago.

But its electronic properties were not exploited until the 1940s.

That's when scientists discovered a feature of silicon

that would ultimately lead to the electronics revolution.

By adding small amounts of other minerals, they were able

to transform silicon from an insulator into a semi-conductor.

This new material could be made to behave like a switch that could turn on and off.

Or even amplify an electric signal being passed through it.

A transistor.

Transistors were to become the building blocks of something

that would change our lives forever - computers.

PLAYS TUNE

If you listen to the experts, they say that because of this chip,

startling changes are going to be made in all our lives - the way we live, work and play.

But how dramatic a revolution is it going to be?

In the early 1970s, Horizon investigated the potential impact of computers on the workplace.

'A strip mill is like a 2,000ft-long pastry board,

'rolling the hot steel progressively thinner.

'Two computers run this show and they're already recruiting a third.

'The steel ends up as a coil one tenth of an inch thick.

'The last human decision is taken here.

'A bell rings every 80 seconds and the man has to decide whether to press a button or not.

'If he does, the next slab comes out of the furnace and is sent off down the line.

'From then on, unless something goes wrong, the men in the other

'control pulpits perched high above the steel just sit back and watch.

'How does a man feel about coming to work, only as a back-up to the computer?

'One problem is isolation.

'An intercom is a poor substitute for a chat with your mates.

'And a fish tank is cold company for a sociable man.'

But while it was initially viewed with suspicion,

the silicon revolution gathered pace.

To perform more complicated tasks,

groups of transistors were placed together on a wafer of pure silicon.

This became known as the silicon chip.

A device that promised a brave new world.

'You're going to see something absolutely amazing,

'a machine reading to a blind man.

'A computer will read an ordinary book.

'It will speak it aloud in its own artificial voice.

'The first words of the book are, "Why suddenly do so many feel

'"so strongly about Jimmy Carter, pro and con?"'

-COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE:

-Why suddenly do so many feel

so strongly about Jimmy Carter, pro and con?

This book attempts to unravel the mysteries of Carter's extraordinary success story,

as remembered from Jimmy,

the nominee of the one-nine-seven-six

Democratic National Convention, as well as to provide "gui-de" lines...

G-U-I-D-E-L-I-N-E-S, "gui-de" lines...

for understanding and evaluating the event...

'A man will talk and a computer obey.'

Turn right, stop.

Turn right, stop.

'A man's voice being understood by a machine.'

Stop. Forward.

Run.

Turn left.

'At the heart of both these machines are tiny powerful computers

'built around the new technology of silicon chips.

'This is the size of a computer today.

'As powerful as the biggest of only a few years ago,

'but 1,000 times cheaper.

'What makes it possible is this.

'Inside here is a silicon chip, with all the important components

'of the computer etched onto its tiny surface.

'It's called a micro-processor.

'Under an electron microscope, magnified and slowed down, it's possible to see it at work.

'Electric pulses being directed by switches.

'By sending the pulses along different channels,

'a chip can be made to do anything from arithmetic to reading a book.

'Such chips will totally revolutionise our way of life.

'They're the reason why Japan is abandoning its ship building

'and why our children will grow up without jobs to go to.'

The extent of the revolution became apparent,

as computers were increasingly integrated into our daily lives.

'There's a new machine coming into use.

'It's called a word processor and it's probably a more important step

'than the invention of the typewriter.

'It uses no paper, the text can be moved around,

'edited and instantly corrected.

'The machine works out line lengths, where to begin a new page,

'and even corrects simple spelling mistakes.

'The text is stored in memory chips, controlled by two micro-processors.

'They rearrange the text by shunting it from one memory block to another.'

But whilst we cautious Brits were still working out what we thought

about the silicon revolution, other nations were quick to embrace it.

'These children are programming their own Space Invaders.

'This little boy can be no more than eight years old.

'In the market place at Akihabara in Tokyo,

'micro-electronics has gone do-it-yourself.

'This shop goes further still. It's the cheapest place in town to buy integrated circuits, chips.

'On a Saturday afternoon,

'they queue up to buy the latest memory chips for a handful of yen.

'The Silicon Age has gone DIY too.

'Its very immediacy gives you an indication of just how far

'micro-electronics has sunk into Japanese culture.

'A whole generation is growing up in Japan as familiar

'with building home computers as our children are at building Lego.'

This willingness to adopt new technology meant Japan

was at the forefront of the silicon goldrush.

Japanese business raced neck and neck with the US to develop the world's fastest silicon chips.

'Dominating big computers means toppling the world leader, America's IBM.

'And in Kawasaki City, Fujitsu are preparing to do just that.

'Sat in the corner, looking as exciting as a row of filing cabinets, is the machine

'they hope to do it with, their latest number cruncher - the M380.

'But for the M380, Fujitsu has moved ahead.

'These are the latest chips, the much more powerful 64,000 bit,

'known in the trade as the 64K.'

64K sounds tiny today, when we have megabytes and terabytes.

But in 1984, it was extraordinarily powerful.

In 20 years, silicon had gone from a material in which scientists

had observed interesting behaviour to one that had given us digital watches, personal computers

and all manner of technological advances.

It was our deep understanding of silicon's potential that kick-started

a vast electronics revolution.

Ah!

As I move it around the table top,

a little cursor, or arrow, on the screen moves in a relative position.

An operator can change the photographic record,

using a device similar to an electronic paintbrush.

This is a highly intelligent car.

'Go left onto the A3095.'

Ever smaller transistors that worked faster

and were cheaper to make cemented silicon's success.

A few years ago,

the computers operating this little model

would have been so big,

you could hardly have got them inside a double-decker bus.

By 1989, a million transistors fitted on a single chip.

In 2005, it was a billion.

'When you're dealing with figures like this, it isn't an evolution any more, it's a revolution.'

But there is a physical limit to how small silicon transistors can be made.

And that means we must find a replacement material

if we want even smaller, faster and cheaper computing at our fingertips.

At the cutting edge of semi-conductor science

is organic electronics, where transistors are made of carbon-based materials 100 times smaller

than the tiniest silicon switches.

Experts predict that silicon's dominance may finally be over within the next ten years.

Scientists have gone to the ends of the Earth

and even beyond in their bid to find and develop the materials that have dramatically changed our world,

and the way we all live in it.

They've explored ocean depths, invented groundbreaking new techniques, and come to understand

materials at a subatomic level.

And all the while,

big business has been watching for the next major breakthrough.

The potential a material has to change every aspect of our lives means that science and industry

will never give up in their pursuit of the next big thing.

With the right application, a material can truly propel us

out of one age and into the next.

And it's likely that understanding them at the most fundamental level possible will be crucial

to finding new ways of exploiting them.

But beyond that, who knows where the next big breakthrough is going to take us!

# Cos we are living in a material world

# And I am a material girl

# You know that we are living in a material world

# And I am a material girl

# (Living in a material) Material! #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd