Home Everyday Miracles: The Genius of Sofas, Stockings and Scanners

'Every day, our lives collide with thousands of things.

'Some seem rather simple.

'Others, we take for granted.

'But the trappings of modern life and the materials they're made from

'have transformed the way we live,

'giving us comfort, pleasure,

'and power.

'Behind them is a story of hidden transformations,

'proof that we live in an age of miracles...'

This is nothing less than levitation!

'..where the weak and fragile can become the super-strong.

'Where parts of the human body can be built by machine.'

I mean, that feels like science fiction.

'These are the innovations that have transformed our world.'

I mean it's just so audacious!

I can't believe they actually did it.

'The materials that have allowed us to create a world we enjoy.'

It's already feeling comfy.

'The visionaries who made it happen

'turned new materials into miracles of mass-production...'

Look, baby seals!

'..that define the modern world.'

Look at that, weow-weow-weow!

'I'll be recreating their genius in the lab, and investigating

'the properties of the remarkable things they created,

'the everyday miracles that have transformed our homes,

'our world, and ourselves.'

I'm going to start by looking at how inventors

and designers have transformed our homes.

How their genius has elevated the mundane to the miraculous.

You're probably watching this on your television,

sitting on a comfy sofa, or on a computer sitting in bed.

Either way, your home is full of carpet, and furniture,

and all the accoutrements of modern life.

What that means is that you've collected a vast array

of metals, ceramics, glasses, liquid crystals, LEDs,

and a huge panoply of plastics,

and that collection is very impressive indeed.

All the more impressive when you consider that,

just a few generations ago, almost none of that stuff existed.

To get a real sense of that, I've travelled back in time

to visit a house in Britain at the turn of the 20th century.

This is the living room from a house around 1900.

Two adults, six or seven children would've inhabited this space,

and I mean inhabited. I mean, this was their living room,

their kitchen, their bathroom.

They had a bedroom upstairs where they all slept,

but the rest of the time they were here, and it's incredibly small,

and incredibly spartan.

The house looks so different because of what's in it,

and what's NOT in it.

Nearly everything has been painstakingly made by artisans

and craftsmen from the same wood, metals and fabrics

that had been available for hundreds of years.

And, in comparison to our modern lives,

the number and variety of possessions is tiny.

They speak of a life, for most people, of hard graft,

with little comfort or colour.

We've come a long way since 1900. Our homes have been transformed,

and, for me, that transformation hasn't come about

because of benign government, or advanced philosophical thinking,

but because of our mastery of stuff.

Our homes are now bright, hi tech pleasure palaces.

Gone is the drab austerity.

And the reason they're such a pleasure to spend our lives in

is due to our first everyday miracle.

It's a material straight out of the lab, and since it was discovered

by mistake in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century,

it's touched every area of our lives,

and caressed every part of our bodies.

In the 1930s, the Germans were pre-eminent in the world

in chemicals and plastics,

and this guy called Otto Bayer, he invented a new one.

He mixed two chemicals, polyol and isocyanate.

That should do it.

Now, mix them together.

There's a reaction between these two liquids

and they form a solid plastic,

and he'd invented polyurethane.

So in a matter of minutes that's turned into a hard plastic.

It's quite a beautiful one.

Even at the time, it was semi-interesting,

a new plastic, but occasionally there was some sort of mistake

in the formulation and something quite different came out,

something marvellous, and I'm going to try and recreate that.

I'm going to put the polyol in,

but not as much as before because you'll see in a minute why.

And about 36g of the di-isocyanate.

OK, so far, so good. What Bayer didn't know

is that his chemicals were sometimes contaminated with water

so I'm going to add a little bit of water to this.

So, at first it's the same, then,

after a while you realise that there's some fizzing going on.

By introducing water to the chemicals in the reaction,

carbon dioxide gas is produced.

A bit like in a fizzy drink, this produces bubbles

but, because the polyurethane solidifies, the fizz is permanent.

What Bayer had inadvertently created was what

we would eventually call foam rubber.

As a result of this accident, we've got two different materials.

They're chemically almost identical but one is a hard solid,

and the other one's a light, foamy material

with completely different material properties.

Having cast the two materials into a piece of tubing,

I can show you what a difference the simple addition of water makes,

using a standard materials science test.

It's called the tomato test.

As you'd expect, the hard resin makes light work of the tomato,

but when I do the same thing with the second baton

the result is very different.

By changing the chemical reaction, the plastic

has become soft and light,

and the tomato easily resists my attack.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Bayer's discovery...

..was that for a good ten years nobody had any idea what to do

with this squidgy new material.

But, today, like it or not, all our lives are inextricably linked

to foam rubber, and hardly any of it is used to attack fruit.

If you're sitting down watching this programme, you're sitting on foam,

almost certainly, because foam is responsible for all the comfy stuff

in your home, whether it's your sofa, your chair, even your bed.

Comfortable sofas and chairs no longer depend on expensive

and labour intensive horsehair, feathers, flock and springs.

Nowadays, comfort can be delivered with this one single material.

And the real beauty of foam is that it is easily mass-produced

so we can all enjoy the comfort it provides.

This factory alone produces a fresh,

individually moulded piece of foam every 30 seconds.

So you can mould a whole piece of furniture

in one go with this process.

That's the backbone of the chair, it's a steel frame,

that goes into the mould, and then the mould will be closed over,

and then the polyurethane mixture will go in

and that will foam around the whole frame and create an integrated

piece of furniture that's both stiff and comfortable.

The mould's heated from the outside so that the skin cures faster

than the interior, so you get a nice, smooth outer surface.

Another piece of furniture is gestating in the womb

of this mould and will soon become a fully formed,

comfy seat...for human kind.

It's already feeling comfy, it's nice and warm actually.

No chair is complete without the seat, of course.

And there we are, simple as that!

The versatility of foam doesn't stop there.

Changing the initial mixture affects the eventual density

and squidginess,

so foam can be used to create a dazzling array of padded products.

So, not only can you make comfy seats out of this stuff,

but you can do all manner of things.

Have a look at this - squidgy, plasticky foam can withstand

temperatures up to 200 degrees, used in engines to absorb sound.

Or this.

I mean this is an armrest, and yet it feels very hard,

it feels like that can't possibly be a foam, but it is.

How about this? This is a tray for an aeroplane meal,

you've had these a million times, there's the cup holder,

the whole thing's a piece of foam.

There's no end to it.

Here's a headrest for a fighter pilot's seat.

And here's the nice bit - this is hard in the middle

but soft on the outside so you can change its properties

all round the seat cover, and yet super light for a plane.

And if you're not satisfied with that, you can have foam that

squidges and remembers where you squidged it.

It's called memory foam.

And all of this, all of this due to a mistake by Otto Bayer.

And to think at the time they had no idea what to do with the stuff,

and the answer was, well, pretty much everything.

You can probably find foam,

sometimes in several different incarnations,

in every room of your home.

But there are many more everyday miracles when you start to look.

Even - maybe especially - where you don't expect to find them.

One of the greatest examples of this is something I first

encountered in rather a painful way when I was just 15 years old.

I was on my way home from school, a Tube journey I made every day.

As I was waiting for my train, a guy in an anorak came right close

up to me and said, "Give me your wallet."

I didn't really know what to say.

I had 23 pence on me and wasn't inclined to give it up.

It had already been allocated to future purchases.

"I've got a knife," he said, and I looked down to his pocket

and there was definitely something pointy in there

but I thought it's probably a pen or his finger.

It definitely wasn't a knife.

It was then that my Tube arrived and I devised my brilliant escape plan.

I would simply run past him before the doors closed.

But as I did he stabbed me.

He cut through five layers of clothing and two layers of skin,

leaving me with a 13 centimetre gash on my back.

As it turned out, I was right - he didn't have a knife,

he'd used a razor blade.

And that revelation that something so small

could do so much damage

shocked me more than the idea that my life had been threatened.

What a piece of material that is. What a sliver of metal.

Springy, elastic, and, yet,

strong, and hard, and ultra sharp.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I wasn't enjoying being stabbed

and having blood gushing down my back,

but the whole experience did make me realise just quite how important

materials are and how that they are at the heart of civilisation,

that our ability to turn rock into stuff like this

IS who we are.

The razor blade is our next everyday miracle.

It was born in the United States in 1901,

a nation clearly in desperate need of a shave.

It was the brainchild of one man,

a man who gloried in the name of King Camp Gillette.

That actually was his real name.

Gillette had identified a problem.

He realised that shaving was a complicated

and time-consuming business.

Cut-throat razors were expensive,

and needed sharpening every time you used them,

and that's where Gillette saw his opportunity.

He would make a cheap,

disposable blade from as little steel as possible.

His challenge was to make it hard enough to hold

an ultra sharp edge needed for shaving.

I've got a thin bit of steel here,

and if I wanted to turn it into a razor blade so I could shave

my face with it, well, I've got a bit of a problem

because it's a bit bendy,

it's not particularly strong,

and it's certainly not very sharp.

So, how can I transform that into something that is all of those

things - strong, hard and sharp? And I can do that using something

called a heat treatment, and I'm going to show you what I mean. So...

..turn on this blowtorch.

I'm going to heat it up to red-hot.

And now I'm going to quench it.

Now let's see what we've done to this piece of steel.

Oh, yeah - brittle.

But that brittleness is because the steel has become incredibly hard,

and that's the hardness you need to make a sharp edge.

Gillette's next challenge was that

hardening and tempering steel, so that it can be sharpened,

was traditionally done in forges by blacksmiths.

Gillette's tiny slivers of metal couldn't be produced that way.

So he invented a brand-new manufacturing process.

Each individual blade starts life on a roll of medium carbon steel.

They're first stamped into shape.

Then fed through three ovens and freezers

to reach just the right hardness.

Still on the roll, the blades are sharpened

three times before being separated, packaged and boxed.

Not only could men now shave at home in relative safety, the blades

contained so little metal they were cheap and, crucially, disposable.

And because he threw blades away,

the customer would have to keep coming back.

It was a brilliant business model.

Gillette was ultimately selling time, and time is money.

He boasted that his razors could save the US economy

450 million a year.

This sliver of metal is a minor miracle.

It's changed the way we live our lives,

and that's the challenge to all materials -

they have to meet a human desire or need to become part

of our everyday lives, otherwise their impact will always be limited.

And perhaps the perfect example

of that kind of perfect everyday miracle

first became part of our everyday lives

here in Northumberland, at this far-from-ordinary stately home.

The man who lived in this house

made his money making guns - naval guns, field guns

and all sorts of weaponry sold to the British government.

But it was here rather than on the battlefield that he introduced

a new technology that soon everybody in the world would want.

His name was William Armstrong, and this place,

Cragside, was his pride and joy.

Armstrong filled it with the most up-to-date gadgets

the Victorian Age could muster.

In the kitchen, there were hydro-powered rotisseries,

and a rudimentary dishwasher.

Servants were summoned not by bells but given precise orders

over the state-of-the-art internal telephone system.

Visitors to Cragside dubbed it the palace of the modern magician.

Armstrong was an industrialist and a self-made man,

and he designed and built Cragside in just ten years.

In terms of heritage, it's a fake,

but not coming from a long line of aristocrats

does have some advantages.

You're much less likely to be hamstrung by tradition

and the conventional ways of doing things.

And Armstrong was anything but a slave to convention.

Had he lived today, Armstrong might well have prided himself

on thinking outside the box.

He was keen to update the costly, labour intensive oil lamps

and candles which were the only source of night-time light.

He wanted to go electric.

In 1878, Armstrong added to his repertoire of everyday miracles

and installed an arc light at the gallery at Cragside.

And while it was a great idea,

there was a big problem with his electric light.

I can show you why by building one of my own.

It's actually dead easy to make light from electricity using

some pretty simple apparatus.

Two clamps, a generator,

some carbon electrodes, which have been coated in copper just to get

the electrical conductivity a bit higher.

Some safety screens.

Connect the electrodes.

That looks about right.

Goggles, of course,

and gloves.

OK, ready to create some light.

Just got to get the gap right.

There we go.

The temperature inside there is about 3,000 degrees,

maybe more. An intense white light.

You can see there's a couple of problems, one of which is

that there's too much light and not the right sort.

So, it's lovely white light, but there's also a hell of a lot

of UV light, which is why we're wearing these goggles.

A lot of smoke as well and of course, the noise.

And that really just means that it's not at all practical for the home.

What was needed was a less severe and safer alternative.

Attempts were made to produce light using thin carbon filaments

that glowed when electricity passed through them.

But producing a carbon filament that worked proved elusive.

It was a challenge taken up by two men.

One was the American Thomas Edison and the other was British.

His name was Joseph Swan.

In the US, Edison tried carbonising over 2,000 natural products,

from bamboo to beard hair.

While simultaneously in the UK, Joseph Swan, a man with a ready

supply of beard hair, struck gold with a carbonised cotton filament.

The carbon filaments worked,

but they had many problems associated with them.

They were mechanically fragile and very sensitive to oxygen.

This creates a significant problem, which I can easily demonstrate.

Not having a beard to carbonise, and to make things easier,

I'm using wire as a filament, but the problem's the same.

I'm going to put it in between these two electrodes.

Connect up a power supply.

Turn the voltage up.

Oop. A little bit of smoke. Ah, yeah!

Here we go.

Beautiful.

See if I can get some white light.

I can.

Ah.

While a fine filament creates a much better light, it very quickly fails.

Because the glow is generated by heat, as the filament gets

hotter, it reacts with oxygen in the air, causing it to burn.

But there is a solution.

So, we've got a glass to cover the filament and some argon gas,

which, if we pump into the glass with a new filament,

then should be able to displace the oxygen and that will protect

my filament from getting oxidised put the glass over the top.

Like that.

Attach the argon.

Turn it on.

So, as it flows in there, it's displacing the oxygen out.

Now, in theory, there shouldn't be hardly any oxygen in there,

so when I turn on the voltage this time,

we ought to be able to get light that lasts.

Here we go.

There we are.

Bright white light and it'll stay bright for thousands of hours.

The light bulb was born.

A filament that will glow white hot

when electricity is passed through it,

encased in such a way that oxygen is removed,

allowing it to shine brighter for longer and not to burn out.

In solving this problem,

Joseph Swan had not only successfully made

an incandescent light bulb, but he'd also acquired a great

friend in William, now Lord, Armstrong.

In December 1880, 37 of Swan's bulbs were installed in Cragside.

And before long, that number climbed to nearly 100.

Another everyday miracle was on the march.

And this is one of the original fittings.

And it consists of a vase and incandescent light.

Now, this has been modernised,

but the original switching mechanism was to take the whole vase

and place it in a bowl of mercury, which completed the connection

and put the light on.

Ten out of ten for style, I think you'll agree,

and this was the first time a whole house had been lit in this way.

And it was revolutionary.

Today, we think nothing at all of switching on a light.

It'd be easy to think that electric lighting arrived

because of the spread of mains electricity

but, actually, it was the other way round.

It was the incandescent light bulb and its use here at Cragside

that showed that safe indoor electric lighting was possible.

And it was this, and the light it brought,

that drove electricity into homes across the world.

So, the light bulb incandesced and was mass-produced and lit our homes.

But that wasn't quite the end of the story.

Rather, the light bulb was the start of a chain reaction of invention.

The light bulb lit up the night, bringing the 24-hour society,

but it also led to some of the most important

inventions of the electronic age, including a replacement for itself.

In the early 20th century, light bulb technology was used in valves,

electronic components that allowed radio and television to develop.

But valves were fragile and unreliable,

and in 1948, transistors arrived that could do the same

job as valves, but without all the glass and all the glowing.

Next came silicon, a semiconductor onto which could be etched

millions of microscopic transistors.

But silicon chips did more than deliver the computer age.

Semiconductors can also be made to release photons,

as a pulse of light and, depending on what they're made from,

you get different colours, say red, blue or green.

These are called light-emitting diodes, LEDs.

You get them in TV screens, computer displays and, more recently,

light bulbs.

And that is how the incandescent light bulb provided

and eco-friendly replacement for itself.

It's odd to think that experiments with glowing beard hair have

impacted on almost all aspects of our modern domestic life.

But they have.

Light on tap and the countless hi tech electronic devices

that fill our homes means that today, we can be permanently

entertained without ever having to leave the house.

But it's not just how we furnish our homes or the fuel

we use to power them or the gadgets we love.

The homes themselves have radically changed.

Radical change is not usually the first thought that

enters your head when you find yourself here, in Oxford.

This is where I applied to study as an undergraduate,

among the dreaming spires and the Cotswold stone buildings.

So, imagine my surprise when I first came to see my college

and discovered it looked like this.

This is St Catherine's College, Oxford,

and it was designed by an architect called Arne Jacobsen.

He was Danish.

And it's a Modernist take on the Oxford College,

so it has all the features you'd expect - it has a quad,

with a circular lawn, it has a combination all round

the outside, it has a library and a dining hall.

But in every other respect, it's radically different.

These buildings are incarnations of a theory of architecture

dreamt up by French artist and sculptor Charles Edouard Jeanneret.

He called himself Le Corbusier.

He was a man whose ideas would have remained ideas, had it not been

for a new material, another everyday miracle, that gave them life.

Le Corbusier's notion was that buildings should suit our needs,

rather than being just places to shelter from the elements.

He wanted huge windows, to make our homes light and airy,

walls where they were useful,

not just where they were because they had to hold the house up.

He even wanted to raise houses off the ground

and have a garden on the roof.

All laudable aims, but pie in the sky, surely?

Here in England, it all sounded like the ramblings of a madman.

I mean, what does he mean - walls anywhere you wanted?

They had to hold up the roof.

And huge swathes of glass? The building would just fall down.

Le Corbusier's ideas sounded so crazy

because for thousands of years his buildings really would have

fallen down, but Le Corbusier was in the right place at the right time.

His buildings stayed standing because he built them,

using concrete.

Not just any old concrete, but a new concrete,

one that would open up new possibilities for architecture.

To demonstrate what I mean, I'm going

to show you the problem with traditional concrete.

Concrete has been used as a building material for over 4,000 years.

And how it's made has changed little in that time.

It's just basically cement, sand and an aggregate -

in this case gravel, mixed with water.

The cement reacts with the water and hardens, binding the sand

and the gravel into a kind of artificial rock.

Well, that's the concrete mixed.

And, as usual, it reminds you why concrete mixers are so great!

It's pretty hard work!

So, now, the next thing is to put it into the mould.

The brilliance of concrete is that it can be moulded into almost

any shape.

But its use as a building material is limited by one major weakness.

When you get it out of the mould, it looks like this

and it seems pretty strong.

But look what happens when I stand on it.

Oh!

When you put weight on a beam like this, the beam bends slightly,

compressing the material on the top of the beam

and pulling it apart on the bottom.

Concrete is very strong in compression, but very weak

when it's pulled apart, under tension, as it's called.

Slowed down, you can see a crack start at the bottom of the beam

and spread upwards, breaking the beam in two.

There is a way to do something about it.

This is a concrete block made in pretty much the same

way as the other one, except for it's got one extra ingredient.

Now, look at this.

Takes my weight. I can bounce up and down on it. I can even...

..hit it with a sledgehammer.

A few cracks, but it's survived. Let's have another go.

Wow! Even with a pretty big blow, it's doing all right.

Still takes my weight.

You've got to admit, that's pretty impressive.

Now, the magic ingredient is actually visible,

if you have a close look.

It's that thing there, at the end.

It maybe just looks like a bit of aggregate, but actually,

that's the end of a steel rod that runs all the way through this bar.

It's called rebar, it's a piece of steel. This is what it looks like.

It's got an unmistakable form

because if you've ever been past any kind of construction site,

you'll have seen this stuff sticking out of concrete and this is

what stops the cracks that form at the bottom under tension

from destroying the whole structure.

Steel is unbelievably strong in tension and so,

when those tension forces build up, it's the steel that takes them

and it relieves the tension on the concrete and the concrete is

left to take the compression forces, which it's brilliant at.

So, you take the best of two materials,

combine it into one, and create the ultimate building material.

Reinforced concrete was exactly what Le Corbusier needed to

turn his ideas into reality.

It allowed him to build huge multistorey apartment blocks,

so-called cities in the sky, complete with restaurants,

shops, living spaces, all in one building,

parks and playgrounds lifted from the ground and put on the roof.

For many, Modernist buildings and the concrete they're made from can

be difficult to love, but done well, and what you get is transformative.

Light and space and a better quality of life.

And this is what you get at my old college, St Catherine's.

In the construction of the college, its architect, Arne Jacobsen,

put reinforced concrete at the heart of every building.

Cast into huge pillars and beams,

it provides a framework onto which the rest of the building is hung.

Combined with extensive use of metal and glass, Jacobsen's

choice of materials come together to create something spectacular.

From the outside, the concrete is less in evidence.

It's hidden behind the decorative walls and the huge swathes of glass.

It's inside that the impact of Jacobsen's

use of concrete can be most clearly seen.

This is the Great Hall. And it is great!

I mean, there is something really thrilling about this space.

You come in here and the sheer size of it is just really special.

The roof is hung from these concrete beams, which are smooth and sleek.

Sublime! And these pillars, they hold those up.

And everything else is superfluous, structurally.

Everything else is just there to protect you from the wind

and the rain.

By using reinforced concrete pillars and beams, Jacobsen has created

a cavernous dining space, large enough to seat the entire college.

And because the reinforced concrete carries

the weight of the building, the spaces between the beams

and along the top of the pillars can be fitted with windows,

flooding the hall with natural light.

Not everyone likes it.

One former student described his time here

as spending three years at borstal.

For some, this place is an unwanted reminder of the provincial

post-war civic architecture.

But I disagree. I think this is different.

This is concrete in the hands of a genius.

It helps that Arne Jacobsen delivered the whole package here,

a stunning bespoke interior to set off the concrete exoskeleton.

Chairs, tables, even cutlery, are all part of the scheme.

These days, the building continues to divide opinion.

It's recently received a Grade I listing,

which ruffled some feathers, but not mine.

I like this building, I remember my feelings for this building.

I liked living here.

I'm just trying to work out how Jacobsen pulled that off

because it's a Modernist building, there is stark,

strong concrete and there's big bits of glass and, you know,

you think, how affectionate can you really be to those kind of things?

The answer to that question lies partly in another

material that he was particularly adept at working with.

In fact, another everyday miracle.

The sharp straight lines of this concrete

and the glass are really softened by the wood. He's used wood everywhere.

He's used it in the dining room, in the senior common room,

he's used wood in the rooms, and here, in this meeting room.

And it isn't just any type of wood.

This wood has got these curves, they're sensuous,

they're delicate, they're intimate.

And the only way he could have done that is to use a special

type of wood, called plywood.

Plywood is another everyday miracle.

An extraordinary material story.

Plywood is the culmination of one of our longest relationships

with a material, wood.

And its emergence has revolutionised design within the home.

Traditionally, furniture was made from solid wood

and making it was the preserve of craftsmen.

Ornate and intricate pieces were skilfully carved and assembled.

But the properties of wood mean that the design

and shape of objects made with it are limited.

Plywood transforms ordinary wood into something utterly different.

In an almost ludicrously simple process,

it removes the limitations of wood completely.

To see how plywood revolutionised the possibilities for furniture

designers, I've come to Hackney in East London,

home to one of the UK's oldest plywood furniture manufacturers...

..where original 1930s designs are still made from cut wood veneers.

So, is this basically just a big plank of wood that's been cut up?

How do you make that?

Effectively, it's a tree that has been sliced against a knife

and in this particular case, it's 1.5mm.

There's no loss of material and it's all put back

together in the same order and this constitutes a whole tree.

We're sticking it back together in the order in which it was

sliced from the tree and producing laminated sections. Um...

In this particular case, we have 1.5mm birch veneer and in a normal

solid timber of this thickness, you would not be able to bend that.

But because they're individually glued, put together in a stack,

they will bend.

-Ah.

-And they'll even rotate.

-Yeah, there's something very beautiful about that.

-You can twist.

And it's all reliant on the glue.

As the glue sets, it's a rigid glue, so it holds it in that way.

I can see that if you don't get the glue right,

-then this whole thing will just unspring itself.

-Yeah.

Cos you're holding a tension, you're holding it in.

If you use a rubbery glue that does not set glass hard,

this will eventually just come out

and be an embarrassing collection of loose parts of veneer.

The glue is the key to creating plywood.

Making curved furniture would be impossible without it.

Each individual layer of veneer is coated with glue,

before being placed one on top of another.

The whole stack is then put into a mould,

where it's bent into shape and left to set.

The glue sets so hard that once the veneers are removed,

they're locked into shape.

And all that's left to do is to cut and finish the final piece.

The furniture that plywood made possible was curved and contorted.

When it was introduced in the 1930s, the use of wood in this way

was considered controversial and its appearance shocking.

Since then, plywood furniture has redefined the boundaries of what is

possible with wood and it's become a common feature of modern homes.

Plywood is not just useful cos it's flexible and mouldable,

it has another very useful property.

Take a look at just a normal plank of wood, like this.

If I put it between these two tables,

and get a 4kg weight and drop it...

..it doesn't withstand that impact, and why is that?

Well, because a plank of wood has a grain,

so the grain was aligned along the direction of this gap

and so when the weight hit it, it split along the grain.

So wood is strong in one direction, and weak in another.

Plywood is little bits of ply.

Each one has a grain and each one is actually very weak indeed.

But, if you crisscross the grains, and glue them together,

like this, then actually what you build up is a piece of wood

that's strong in all directions.

Using seven of these thing sheets, I've made my own piece of plywood.

Each sheet has been glued together, alternating the grain direction

each time, before being put into these clamps and being left to set.

The result is a piece of plywood that is the same

thickness as my original piece of solid wood.

OK, so this is the ply, this is crisscross, glued together.

Now, we'll do the same test on that.

No problem at all.

The glue bonds with the wood fibres and sets hard.

And because the grain of each veneer runs perpendicular to the next,

the weakness is removed.

It's this that makes plywood incredibly strong

and incredibly light, when compared to natural wood.

It's plywood's strength, flexibility and mouldability that's

allowed it to have such a big impact on the world.

And nothing encapsulates that more than this.

When it entered service during the Second World War,

the Mosquito was the fastest aircraft in the world.

And the secret to its success was it was made almost entirely of plywood.

By using plywood, the precisely shaped aerodynamic

wing could be made in one single piece.

What's more, the plywood stressed skin gave the wing enormous

strength, reducing the need for heavily internal bracing

and making it incredibly light.

The fuselage was moulded in two halves, and the whole thing

was then assembled and glued together, like a model aircraft.

The result was an aeroplane that was cheap and easy to produce,

but with a top speed of over 400mph.

And all because of the remarkable properties of plywood.

Materials have transformed the way we live,

extending our day and saving us time.

They've changed the spaces we choose to live in, allowing us

to construct homes in bigger, higher and brighter buildings.

Adapted old stuff and brand-new stuff gives designers and makers

a huge array of materials from which to produce the modern world.

But there's one material that defines our age like no other.

It's versatile, strong and scalable.

It can be any colour, shape or texture.

And can be produced to display a dazzling variety of properties.

It's the rubber in foam rubber and the glue in plywood.

It's an everyday miracle in its own right

and has spawned countless more everyday miracles.

It has many different formulations, but we know it simply as plastic.

Since the 1930s, plastic has become utterly ubiquitous.

This factory alone uses over 25,000 tonnes of the stuff every year

and produces over 10 million toy parts every day.

The only way these toys can be made in such enormous quantities

is by using injection moulding machines like these.

This is a mould from the machine.

You can see it comes in two halves and they fit together

and create a cavity on the inside and in this case,

it looks like that produces a castle.

I can show you how it works over here cos with a smaller one,

you can really get into the detail.

So, it's quite an intricate mechanism. It's a bit like a lock.

Here, inside, is one half of the mould.

And as it's closed together, you can

see that bits of the mould fall into place.

And as this comes across here and in, there's a cavity created here.

And then, you get cooling water in here, hot plastic in here,

and then at the end of that process, out it comes, the piece is made.

It's there.

And then, some pins jut forward and they push out the part.

And there you have a fine bit of injection moulding.

And this thing that you may be wondering what it is, is a ghost.

Not a ghost of the machine, but a ghost out of the machine.

Because you can melt and re-solidify plastics like these,

they're massively scalable.

Any size, any shape, it's not a problem.

Look! Baby seals!

Tiny little baby seals. This is... I think it's a baby T-Rex's arm.

And this is a monkey tail.

So, you can make anything - any size, any shape,

any colour you want it, they can make it.

Plastic is the ultimate manufacturing material.

You can make it into any shape you like.

A toy, a pen, a computer keyboard, a car bumper, or a boat.

Tough and durable, or soft and bendy. From airliners to clingfilm.

It's a designer's dream.

I mean, look at this thing. It's so intricate. It's got hair.

Several different materials all made in the same machine at once,

with moving parts.

It's sort of an incredible miracle of modern engineering

and here it is being produced at the rate of 3.2 per second.

I mean, that's a lot better than the human race is doing.

We're doing 2.6 children per second.

In the last 100 years, plastics have come to dominate the material world.

It seems there really is a plastic for everything.

They're so common, in fact,

it's easy to forget that we're often even clothed in plastics.

In the 1940s, a group of plastic fibres was introduced that

would change the world of fashion for ever.

I'm going to attempt to make some plastic fibre

out of these two chemicals.

Now, one is a sebacoyl chloride solution

and the other one is a diaminohexane solution.

In a minute, you'll see how they react together.

And I'm pouring it very carefully

because actually one is oil-based and is floating on the top

and the other one is water-based and has sunk to the bottom.

The key thing about these particular chemicals is that the small

molecules of each liquid are capable of bonding together with

the molecules of the other to form larger molecules,

long chains, called polymers.

And that's exactly what happens where they meet.

A chemical reaction takes place, creating a delicate film,

the polymer, between the two liquids.

If I then remove the film with a pair of tweezers,

a fresh boundary is created and the reaction continues.

And I get huge long chains of plastic,

and as long as I keep pulling, so this will continue.

If I attach this to this mandrill and rotate, I get as much as I want.

I just keep rotating this.

And as long as there are two liquids in this beaker,

I get more and more of this plastic filament.

And this was one of the most influential

plastics in the 20th century.

And it's called, of course, nylon.

Nylon was developed by Wallace Carothers at DuPont,

in the late 1930s.

It was one of the first fully synthetic fibres.

And one of the first uses for this new plastic fabric was

a product which quickly became known as nylons.

In the early decades of the 20th century,

the hemlines of fashionable ladies' dresses began to rise.

Slowly, more and more leg was being revealed.

What was needed was a cheap,

sleek and sheer garment to cover the exposed skin.

Nylon was quickly pressed into service.

Here, I've got a little box of some of the original nylon tights.

These are from 1948.

There we are. Look at that! This is an antique!

But a beautiful one.

And look, you can see the shaped leg, the seam down the back.

These were the must-have item of the time.

People rioted in the streets if the stocks ran low of this product.

Woven into stockings, nylon turned a luxury item into something

actually much better than their expensive silk predecessors.

Nylons were durable, easy to wash and had an attractive appearance.

They were so good, in fact, that during World War II,

when stock was scarce, women were reportedly prepared to fight

just to get their hands on them.

But things have actually changed a lot since then.

They're not made of pure nylon any more.

In fact, if you take a pair of modern tights

and have a look at them,

what you get is actually something that's far more sophisticated.

It has a lot of give in it, for a start.

And that's because there's a new material in there,

not just nylon, but elastane. Here's some nylon.

And this is a great, nice, stiff, strong fibre, good durability,

but it doesn't have much give and actually, it'll just snap

if you pull it too hard.

And over here is a role of elastane. You might know it as Lycra.

And this is very stretchy stuff. Look at that!

And so you can stretch it quite a long way before it breaks.

So, the thing is, you've got these two things.

One gives you a very nice feel next to the skin

and it's very sheer, and the other one gives you this flexibility,

conforms to any shape you want it to be.

And how do you combine them together?

Well, you can either weave them together,

or you can actually combine them in a single fibre. Look at this.

So, this has got an elastane core, nylon wrapped around it.

This factory in Derbyshire produces more

than 700,000 pairs of tights every week.

Each is woven and stitched together by an array of balletic

robotic machines.

And because of elastane,

each of the 120 different designs will be a perfect fit,

something appreciated by the women who work here.

-So, what would life be like without tights?

-Very boring.

You can dress an outfit up. So they're essential.

They're not just something to keep you warm,

they're something to set your outfit off, you know?

Make you look sexy, make your legs look long.

-They make you feel sexy as well.

-Yeah, make you feel sexy.

So, life would be less sexy, less interesting and a bit cold.

If you haven't got time to shave, they're a good cover up!

LAUGHTER

Synthetic fibres like nylon

and elastane epitomise our mastery of materials.

Our ability to invent

and engineer new materials specific to our needs and use them

to manufacture products that are affordable to the greatest

number of people.

Our homes, what we put into them, and how we use them,

have been revolutionised by our ability to make new materials.

Yet, despite the material diversity of our homes,

all new materials share some fundamental similarities.

They make our lives more secure, more comfortable and more enjoyable.

King Camp Gillette freed up time and made shaving a less hazardous

pursuit with his disposable razor blade.

The marvellously unshaven Joseph Swan gave us

more usable time with his electric light bulb, ultimately

kick-starting the electrification of our homes and ushering

in an age of electrically-powered domestic appliances.

And the world of plastics has delivered to us

a cornucopia of creature comforts, from cushioning to clothing,

that nowadays, we just can't imagine being without.

For centuries, comfort

and convenience was the preserve of the rich,

and that's because the objects that made up a home were handmade.

That's time consuming and expensive. And now, we all live all like kings

and queens cos we've created materials that can be

mass-produced, and that's allowed everybody to have

a bit of comfort and luxury in their homes.

'Next time, even more miracles.'

So there you are, that's the raw superconductor levitating itself.

'I'll be on the road...' It's liberation.

'..looking at how our mastery of stuff has coaxed us

'out of our homes

'and kept us safe, as we travelled further and moved faster.

'How getting around town landed us up in space.

'And how our obsession with going further has allowed us to see

'ourselves in a totally new light.

'And even become creators.'

This gives a whole new meaning to a new nose job, doesn't it?

If you would like to explore some of the everyday

miracles of engineering and materials,

have a look at the free learning activities

on the Open University website. Go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University.