Plastic: How It Works How It Works

From the simplest stuff, rock, sand and clay,

we've created vast cities that have changed the face of the planet.

By manipulating metals we've conquered land, sea and air.

But I think the material that's perhaps our greatest achievement

is something entirely artificial, invented by us,

and created in the lab.

Plastic.

It's not just technologically marvellous stuff.

It's fundamentally changed how we live.

It's allowed us to be modern.

My name is Mark Miodownik

and I'm fascinated by the stuff that makes our modern world.

-Woah!

-Yeah.

-Wow!

In this programme, I'm going to explore how we turned our backs

on the raw materials of nature and began to design and create our own.

Plastic - better, cheaper, and entirely man-made.

We've created more new materials in the last 100 years

than in the rest of history, and what's really exciting about that

is that it's just the beginning.

We're on the verge of creating a new generation of materials

more ambitious than ever before.

And that's because we are coming full circle

and making new materials that are completely artificial,

but which take their inspiration from the natural world.

This is bio-degradable polymer. It's a plastic.

And in the future,

most of us will have some of it implanted in our bodies.

It's designed to help the human body rebuild itself,

allowing us to heal faster and better.

And when its job is done, the plastic dissolves and disappears.

You're looking at the future,

where material science meets medical science.

And plastics are at the heart of that research.

This shows how far we've come with plastic,

this designer material that we created.

So how did we get here?

Well, this most artificial of substances began life

in the industrial revolution when man's progress seemed unstoppable,

and we looked at nature's materials and thought,

"Hmm. We can do better."

The story began in 1834, in a prison in Philadelphia

with one inmate who saw the potential

of a newly imported natural material.

His name was Charles Goodyear,

and he'd been locked up for not paying his debts.

But Goodyear wasn't making his supper,

he was cooking up something entirely different.

Goodyear was obsessed with this stuff, natural rubber.

It was the miracle substance of the early 19th century

because it had some very strange properties.

It was stretchy but it was also waterproof.

And this meant that it seemed to have huge potential to make things

like raincoats, tyres and wellies.

If, however, it wasn't for one thing.

This is a ball of natural rubber

and you can see that at room temperature

it's pretty lively stuff.

But if you change the temperature,

well then, the material changes its behaviour.

So look, I've got some different types of temperature here.

I've got a ball that's been cooled down.

And here it is.

And let's see how that behaves.

It's quite ridiculously dead, inert.

None of that springiness. None of that liveliness is left.

And what about the hot one?

It's funny, you only have to heat it up a little bit

and it becomes really pongy and also sticky.

Almost disgusting. It's a very unpleasant material to be around.

In Goodyear's day, people noticed this

and products made out of natural rubber

were pretty hopeless in the hot or the cold weather.

Shops that sold them, well, they were inundated with complaints.

So this is the problem that Goodyear was trying to solve.

Goodyear was determined to find the magic ingredients

that would improve rubber and transform it into a material

that didn't melt in the heat or go hard in the cold.

He tried mixing rubber with the most bizarre substances imaginable,

from black ink to witch hazel to chicken soup!

But nothing seemed to work.

But his luck was to change.

In 1839, having been bailed out of debtor's prison,

Goodyear found himself at a small rubber company in Massachusetts.

Dr Stuart Cook is director of research

at the Malaysian Rubber Board's UK research centre

and is going to help us recreate what Goodyear did.

That counts as one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.

Goodyear was still trying anything he could lay his hands on.

And this time,

he tried adding two substances to the natural rubber,

yellow sulphur and white lead,

which was commonly used as a pigment.

Using the factory's mill, these were ground into the natural rubber

until they were both thoroughly mixed in.

So you can see now the rubber compound

has changed quite dramatically.

Yes. It's looking extremely voluptuous, actually.

-It's got this creaminess about it.

-Yes.

So far, there were no signs that Goodyear was any closer

to reaching his goal of improving on natural rubber.

The rubber compound that came out of the mill

appeared no better than previous attempts.

Stuart, I have to say it is sticky.

I mean, he must have been pretty disappointed

because he's trying to solve the stickiness problem, and it's sticky.

The crucial thing is what happened next.

Whether by mistake or not,

Goodyear left the rubber compound lying on a hot stove.

Natural rubber would have melted into a gooey mess,

but Goodyear's rubber compound didn't do this.

The combination of sulphur, white lead and heat

had transformed the rubber into a very different material.

That is absolutely extraordinary. What an amazing material.

So Goodyear, when he referred to this,

said it had the appearance of looking charred.

It's better than charred, I think he was under-estimating that!

And it's not sticky.

Cured, as Goodyear said.

This is what the surface of natural rubber looks like

magnified over 10,000 times.

It's an irregular structure with stretched-out fibres

interspersed with tiny air pockets.

By a process which became known as vulcanisation,

Goodyear had transformed this to make it useful to man.

The key to that change is what happens inside the rubber.

Natural rubber is made up of lots of long strands.

Each one, a single molecule made of atoms.

During vulcanisation, the sulphur creates links between the molecules.

This is what makes rubber tougher

and able to withstand hot or cold temperatures.

So he must have been a very happy man?

I think he realised the importance of this chance discovery.

But it took him then many years to convince the rest of the world.

But this was really the start of the rubber industry as we know it.

Goodyear's breakthrough led to an explosion in rubber products.

Wellies, tyres, waterproofs,

which worked whatever the weather.

Across the world, production rocketed by more than a hundredfold.

And everywhere, consumers bought rubber, in its new vulcanised form.

The significance of Goodyear's discovery went far beyond rubber.

What he showed was the power of chemistry

to transform raw materials into something new.

What he'd discovered was still called rubber

but it didn't occur naturally.

It was man-made.

Now our ambitions became even greater.

As the Industrial Revolution swept across the globe,

it brought an insatiable demand for new materials.

Building on our success with rubber,

now wherever nature was found wanting,

we began to attempt to better it

by creating new artificial substances of our own design.

That quest would be taken up

in the smoky drinking saloons of 19th century America,

with a competition announced in a newspaper.

On offer was a reward of 10,000

to the person who could find a replacement material

for the expensive ivory used in making billiard balls.

It was 1865.

The American Civil War was over

and there was renewed interest in this game.

Billiards was getting more and more popular.

And so ivory was getting more and more expensive.

The race was on to find something to replace ivory.

After the newspaper ad, suggestions came flooding in

about using glass, porcelain, metal, even rubber!

But nothing worked.

The truth is that ivory is a really good fit for billiards.

It's hard so it doesn't scratch

and it's elastic so it bounces off other balls.

It can be coloured

and also it can be machined into a perfectly round ball.

Nothing else was up to the job.

So it seemed that the replacement for ivory

would have to be something completely new.

The big bucks reward caught the attention of John Wesley Hyatt.

Hyatt fancied himself as a bit of an inventor,

and reckoned he could make an artificial billiard ball

as good as ivory.

Little did he realise,

this would lead him to create something far more significant,

the world's first commercial plastic.

But the truth is that Hyatt would have gotten nowhere

if it hadn't been for a lucky find.

Hyatt noticed a spilt bottle of this stuff, collodion, in his cupboard.

Now, Hyatt was a printer and he used collodion to protect his hands

from the heat of the printing press.

But where it had spilt, he noticed it had created a hard, thin film

and it was transparent and it felt a little bit like ivory.

Had he found what he'd been looking for?

Hyatt's idea was to use collodion that he'd in made different colours

as an outer coating for wooden billiard balls

to give them an ivory finish.

I'm going to have a go at making

Hyatt's collodion-coated billiard balls

with the help of Steve Rannard,

Professor of Chemistry at the University of Liverpool.

..and then it's a simple process of just taking the dyed collodion

and dip so it goes completely under the surface.

That is really pleasing.

That's like one of the nicest toffee apples I've ever made,

although it's clearly a billiard ball.

Well, the idea that Hyatt had, of course,

was to use a core of something that you could readily form,

that you could make very easily,

and then slowly build up layers and layers of collodion

to make it ivory-like on the outside

and hopefully give all the properties of ivory

that you'd get from a billiard ball of the time.

So you can see with this one,

it could do with just another dip to give that shiny outer coat.

I must say, it's slightly addictive.

Although I'm doing nothing of skill at all.

The interesting thing is what Hyatt must have felt at this point,

because the outer shine of the ball

is just like the object he was trying to make.

It's almost like an ivory coating on the outside of the ball.

And there you have it,

your artificial billiard ball coated with collodion and ready for action!

Hyatt thought he'd cracked it,

a new material to replace natural ivory.

But when he sent his billiard balls off for testing,

he was in for a nasty shock.

They're nice looking balls you've made, Steve.

I have to say, they look the part.

They do.

But they do feel a bit light and they haven't got the right sound.

They feel a bit dull, don't they?

But there was a much more serious issue.

Oh, wow.

That is not what you want a billiard ball to do!

The collodion was highly flammable.

One saloon keeper wrote to Hyatt complaining that

during lively games of billiards, the balls actually exploded,

prompting everybody to draw their guns.

Hyatt's billiard balls had been a complete disaster.

It was a salutary lesson on how difficult it was going to be

to improve on nature.

But Hyatt hadn't given up hope and continued his efforts

to make a viable man-made replacement for ivory.

He had no idea that his work would ultimately have

much wider ramifications and bring luxury to the masses.

This time, he tried adding a different ingredient to collodion,

something called camphor.

Oh! That is very...

It's got a distinctive smell.

If anybody's got a grandmother who used to store clothes in mothballs,

-they'll know exactly what that smell is.

-Of course. All right.

Adding camphor to collodion

was to prove to be Hyatt's master stroke.

When he dried out his solution,

he found he'd created a white substance.

He named it celluloid.

And it would turn out to be the world's first practical plastic.

It's really hard. Described by Hyatt as almost feeling like bone.

And what Hyatt found was that if you add it into hot water,

once it came out of the heat it was really mouldable,

really flexible and he could shape into different shapes.

Yes, wow. That's a completely different material!

And it was the presence of camphor that allowed him to do that.

Hyatt wasted no time in experimenting

with his newly-created celluloid.

Some of the first objects he attempted to make were dentures,

which at that time were extremely pricey.

While the material is in the mould, it'll cool down,

and hopefully it'll adopt the shape of the teeth.

So if we just undo them and take the mould out.

It's all a matter of removing the top.

Drum roll!

And if we pull those out. There we have...

Wow. That is impressive!

Not the best teeth in the world. But they're recognisable teeth.

I think if you don't have teeth, these teeth are going to do!

It was the first time that a plastic

had been successfully moulded into a recognisable shape.

Hyatt had chosen to make dentures,

but celluloid could be made into anything.

This is what the surface of celluloid looks like,

magnified over 10,000 times.

At this scale, you can see lines that are cracks on the surface,

and craters that are air bubbles.

But why celluloid behaves as it does

can only be seen by exploring its inner world.

Celluloid's molecules resemble strands of tangled-up string.

At normal temperature, they're tightly packed together

and can't budge, so the shape is fixed.

But when it's heated above 70 degrees Celsius,

the strands become much looser and are able to be moved around.

That's what allows celluloid to be moulded into different shapes.

Objects that had been crafted out of expensive natural materials

could now be made more cheaply with celluloid.

These are some of the earliest objects made from celluloid.

This is a bust of Victoria and it's imitating ivory,

and here are some salad spoons, again, imitating ivory,

although you can hear that they're not quite right acoustically.

But I think this is my favourite piece,

it's a notepad and this cover,

it looks a bit like tortoise shell but it's actually celluloid.

It's a lovely piece this,

you can imagine an early Victorian detective

getting it out of their pocket.

And that's the odd thing about celluloid

is that although it's this wonder plastic that comes along,

it spends most of its life imitating other materials.

But 20 years after Hyatt first created celluloid,

it found another use that ensured its place

in popular culture for ever.

Celluloid could do what neither ivory

nor any other material could do.

It could be made extremely flexible and sensitive to light.

The invention of celluloid brought about the dawn of cinema.

Just as it immortalised the film stars of the past,

so celluloid ensured its own place in history.

But as a material to make everyday objects,

celluloid had one big flaw.

Celluloid is called a plastic

because it can be moulded into shape.

But there are good reasons why very few objects

are made of celluloid today.

Firstly, it's flammable.

Secondly, it does this.

It loses its shape when it gets heated up.

Not ideal if you have celluloid dentures

and you like a hot cup of tea!

But celluloid had hinted at the brave new world that lay ahead.

We had improved on nature,

and we were convinced we could do even better

with our own, man-made materials.

Our new world would be made of plastic,

conceived in the laboratory and mass-produced in vast factories.

No-one was more aware of the potential of plastic

than Doctor Leo Baekeland.

With new inventions such as the radio, the telephone

and Baekeland's personal favourite, the automobile,

he foresaw a myriad of new uses for plastics.

Baekeland was a chemist and a businessman.

Combining the two had already made him extremely rich,

and now he spotted a new opportunity.

In his mansion in the suburbs of New York, he set to work.

He'd set his sights on replacing shellac

which is the material that old records were made out of.

Shellac is a resin that's excreted by the Indian lac beetle,

and it looks like this!

And as the demand for shellac increased,

the lac beetle just couldn't keep up.

And Baekeland thought that he could solve this problem

by creating a new plastic.

In the grounds of his estate, Baekeland had built a chemistry lab

equipped with everything he would need.

Baekeland's starting point

was to investigate a mysterious chemical reaction.

It involves mixing two chemicals, phenol and formaldehyde.

Dr Sara Ronca is a chemist at Loughborough University

and is an expert in plastics.

This is quite a pongy reaction you've got here.

It's a very smelly one!

This is the reaction that interested Baekeland.

It takes a few minutes before anything happens...

He must have been a patient man, Baekeland?

You really need a lot of patience.

..but then, something rather spectacular occurs.

-Oh! Woah.

-Yeah.

The reaction creates a plastic-y substance

that moulds to the shape of the beaker,

and turns pink.

Nobody had yet found a use for it.

But it caught the attention of Baekeland.

Look it, though. It's pretty cool stuff!

It does look promising, I can see why he's interested in it.

It's sort of plasticy, but it falls apart.

It falls apart and it's porous, so you cannot really use it.

Baekeland understood that if he managed to get

a better version of this material, this could have some potential.

Baekeland believed he could find a way

to modify the chemical reaction

so that it would give him a better, stronger, more useful plastic.

Day after day, he tried everything he could think of.

After five years of painstaking work,

he finally found that by controlling the speed of the reaction

with chemicals and heat, he could produce something different and new.

This time, there was no pink solid produced.

Instead, inside the flask an orange resin was slowly forming.

Let's have a look. It looks...

It's like honey.

It's very very viscous. Exactly like honey.

Baekeland's next step was to pour the liquid resin into a mould.

With pressure and heat,

he hoped it would turn into a solid plastic shape.

In our case, we're trying to make a plastic cup.

So either this is going to be a soggy mess or...

Let's see what we managed to achieve.

Oh. Aw.

Well, I don't think this is quite what we were expecting to produce!

What do you think went wrong?

I guess we didn't wait long enough.

We still have some bubbles in it.

But you can see the shape.

Can you imagine how many times Baekeland had to repeat this

to get something nice?

I think for me, you see modern plastic objects

in their perfect thousands, millions of them.

When you actually try to make one yourself,

you realise it's really tricky stuff.

Baekeland persisted

until he had perfected the process to make hard, solid plastic objects.

And he named his new plastic Bakelite.

As a liquid resin, Bakelite is made up of stringy chains

that can move around, so it can be moulded.

But when heat and pressure are applied,

the chains grow in length, links form between them,

locking Bakelite into shape.

Bakelite was a major breakthrough.

Unlike celluloid, once set hard, it kept its shape for ever.

When Bakelite hit the shops in the 1920s, it caused a sensation.

This was not plastic imitating nature,

but a material in its own right.

Bakelite looked as if it came from the future,

it felt new, fresh and modern.

And many of our most hi-tech products

used Bakelite as their outer shell.

Patrick Cook is curator of the Bakelite Museum in Somerset.

He's amassed one of the largest collections of Bakelite

in the world.

This is the birth of the modern world as we know it!

It is, when you think, what could we have done without it?

No! Is that a Bakelite hot water bottle?

It is, looking like a traditional rubber hot water bottle.

That's fantastic. It's electric. It just heats up.

Don't get distracted. Come this way!

There's a whole variety of different things here.

Look at this, toys. What is this?

Well, you push that along and find out!

Pull it to the back.

My god! Is it a toy?

No, it's a tie.

No, it's what you should be wearing!

I haven't got a tie on. My mum would really approve.

Thanks, Patrick.

Oh, wow.

Now these are the things I really recognise as Bakelite objects.

The art deco era starts coming through this material.

It's amazing to me that radio comes along

and you need a new material

to embody this era of electronics and this wireless sound.

And then, television comes along and Bakelite steps up there too.

I can see that you've got some very extraordinary early television sets.

Well, these are almost the Morris Minor of the television world.

When you look at these screens and how small they are,

however they did get round this

-with this rather wonderful gadget here.

-Brilliant!

So you've got a small screen but you just put this massive lens over it.

Absolutely! You may not be able to see the picture

but you do have a 12-inch-screen.

Because it was mouldable, people could start having fun with

this new hi-tech gadgetry that was coming into people's houses.

It was living the dream, this modern dream, being modern.

It conveyed modernity. This was not only the material of the moment,

but the material of the future.

Is there one object in this marvellous collection

that you think Leo Baekeland would be most delighted to see

if he was to rise from his grave again?

I think the fact that it affected communication

and obviously the telephone is the perfect example.

When you think,

this product actually had a 40 or even a 50 year life...

So this is a Bakelite telephone,

just when the telephone was starting to become part of everybody's life.

Oh, yes. This is a beautiful object, isn't it?

Hello? Is that... Ah, Mr Baekeland, we're on one of your telephones...

By the end of 1930s, over 200,000 tonnes of Bakelite

had been made into a fantastic variety of household objects.

But as successful as it was, even Bakelite had its limits.

What strikes you looking around this wonderful museum

is not just what's here, but what's missing.

There are no plastic bags, there are no water bottles,

there are no trainers,

these objects that form such a large part of our lives.

And that's because Bakelite is just not up to making those things.

It's too hard and brittle. It's inflexible.

And so Bakelite, this material of a thousand uses,

never became as ubiquitous as the plastics we use today.

But that was about to change.

Factories would soon be churning out countless new plastics

that would transform our lives.

They weren't invented by chance or trial and error,

but for the first time

through an understanding of the inner structure of plastics.

Plastics are polymers and that's Greek for many parts.

So they're a bit like this chain of paperclips.

They're individual components linked together.

Although in the case of plastics, the individual components

are molecules containing mostly carbon and hydrogen.

And the key thing is that they can join together to form long chains.

Now in the 1920s, when scientists realised

this is what plastics looked like,

it opened up new possibilities for making plastics.

Because before then, well,

the chemical reactions they were using were a bit of a mystery.

But then they realised that they only had to find molecules

that would link together

and they could create loads of new plastics.

And in one of those great moments in history

where knowledge and opportunity coincide,

scientists realised that a vast source of raw ingredients

for these new plastics had already been discovered.

With the proliferation of the motorcar

and expansion of industry and cities,

enormous quantities of oil and gas were being pumped out of the ground

and processed into fuel.

And the products of oil and gas refineries

were hydrocarbons, containing exactly the kind of molecules

that could join up to make plastics.

Cheap and abundant,

everything was now in place for the plastics explosion.

Nylon, PVC,

polystyrene, polyester.

All destined to become household names.

Plastics were taking over our material world.

Everything from toys and tools to footwear and furniture

could now be made with plastics.

In every aspect of our lives,

they were replacing more traditional materials

like metals and woods, ceramics and leather.

But there was one area which they couldn't compete,

and that's where strength was required.

The modern age demanded strong materials.

And when we needed strength,

we looked not to plastics but to metals.

On their own, plastics were too weak,

too bendy to make a car or a plane.

But plastics had one big advantage, they were light,

an essential quality for speed and flight.

So scientists set out on a quest to create plastics as strong as metals.

In 1963, engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment

in Farnborough made a breakthrough.

They managed to strengthen plastic so effectively,

it looked as though it might give metal a run for its money.

This is carbon fibre.

It's extremely strong, light and stiff.

Scientists found that when they combined it with plastic

they created a new material that was much better

than the sum of its parts.

Some people called it black plastic,

but today we know it as carbon fibre composite.

Here, a carbon fibre composite is being made from sheets

that contain carbon fibres and plastic.

It's built up layer by layer,

on moulds that can take any shape you need.

And then cooked in an oven, to make the plastic set hard.

The end result is a material with a unique combination of properties,

strong, stiff and light.

Ideal for making one of the fastest machines on the planet.

Since the 1980s,

Formula One teams stopped using metal for their car bodies,

and changed to using carbon fibre composite

because of its winning combination

of lightness, stiffness and strength.

Brian O'Rourke is the chief composites engineer

for the Williams team

and was involved in building their first composite car in 1984.

What we're looking at is an awful lot of composite materials.

How much of this is composite then?

Everything that you can see from the outside,

apart from the wheels and tyres.

So, the whole of the fuselage is composite,

-the whole of the underneath?

-Yes.

Suspension elements. This is about structural composite materials.

We have been using these on F1 cars since 1981

in the industry generally

and they replaced metallic materials that went before them.

That's because carbon fibre composites

can offer the benefits of metals for a lot less weight.

So, to compare the two, Brian has set-up a simple experiment for me

with two beams, one steel, one carbon fibre composite.

One critical property is the stiffness, how much give it has.

I'm going to test this by standing on them,

to see how much they bend.

Do Formula One drivers have to do this test?

-Am I treading on the toes of Schumacher or...

-No.

But I think they would be interested in it,

if it was going to make the car go faster.

OK. So if you stand right in the middle.

It's taking my weight no problem at all.

It feels very safe.

Although, let's see how heavy this is...

I've been going down the gym, but yes, it is heavy!

All right, let's try this one.

This is the composite.

No problem at all! One handed!

So this weighs a lot less, but does that mean it will bend a lot more?

Wow. So they've got the same stiffness.

They're able to resist my weight

-but this one is three and a bit times lighter?

-Yes.

That's what's really the interest for us in this material

because it's providing the same stiffness as steel would

but for less than a third of the weight.

So the carbon fibre composite is a great advantage over metallics.

And there's another advantage

that carbon fibre composites have over metals.

In a crash, the front section of the car explodes into tiny fragments.

Although this looks dramatic,

this actually disperses the energy of the impact away from the driver.

In contrast, the driver's cockpit is designed to be strong and rigid.

Together, this means that the driver is protected

as much as possible from the impact.

It's made driving a Formula One car far safer than it used to be.

Until carbon fibre composites can be mass-produced,

they'll stay in the hands of specialists,

but where they can be used, they give huge advantages.

Because of its light weight,

carbon fibre composite isn't just being used

by Formula One racing teams,

it's increasingly being used by the aerospace industry.

The Boeing Dreamliner is exactly half composite.

And in the future, more and more aircraft

will essentially be made from plastic and carbon fibre.

But strength and stiffness aren't all we demand from our materials.

In recent years, one new material with exotic

but incredibly useful properties has come out of the lab.

At the heart of every plastic we've ever made

is one key element, carbon.

We're more familiar with it in its pure state

as the graphite in your pencil, or if you can afford it, diamonds!

But one of the greatest discoveries of the last decade

was a new form of carbon.

It's called graphene, and I can only describe it in superlatives.

It's super-thin, super-strong, super stiff.

It's even a superstar of the electronic world.

Graphene's extraordinary properties were discovered in 2004

at the University of Manchester

by Professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov.

This is who I've come to see.

And it won them the Nobel Prize.

Andre. Mark Miodownik.

Hi, Mark. Nice to meet you.

Andre is going to show me how they first made graphene

in a way that surprised them by its simplicity.

So these are just flakes of graphite?

So it's flakes of graphite which we use in our lab.

Andre calls this the Scotch Tape method.

It was inspired by a colleague showing him some sticky tape

that had been used to clean-up a graphite sample.

On the tape, Andre found incredibly thin flakes of graphite.

Is this some sort of advanced form of Scotch Tape?

No, it's just the same Scotch Tape you can find anywhere.

What you do, you just split it into two,

then split it again into two

and continue this way.

The idea was to split the graphite into thinner and thinner layers,

until it was just one atom thick.

This is how Andre first made Graphene.

It's a beautifully elegant experiment

and what makes it even more beautiful is that for me

is that anyone can do it in their house.

They could get down to an atomic layer of graphene

just by taking their pencil or perhaps a purer form of graphite.

Exactly.

You need a little bit of experience

to find out individual atomic layers, OK, or graphene.

But don't make a mistake.

Nobel prizes are not given for kitchen-run experiments.

It was not the point that we managed to find the very thin flakes.

What we did, we studied properties of these thin layers

and found out that this material is out of our world.

It shows so many beautiful and interesting phenomena.

That was an important step.

This is how they first identified graphene.

The different colours represent different thicknesses of graphite.

The yellow is hundreds of atoms thick.

But the fragment that is faint blue, almost transparent,

is just one single atomic layer.

You can't go thinner than this.

And this is graphene.

It's the strongest material we know.

200 times stronger than steel.

And in this two dimensional material,

electricity travels at an amazing one million metres per second.

Graphene stands out because it shows

so many remarkable properties, especially conductivity.

Think about it, this is only one atom thick

and when you make films thinner and thinner,

usually properties deteriorate,

but in this, you are in the ultimate limit.

Magnified 20 million times,

this is what graphene looks like at the atomic scale.

Each blurry white spot is an individual carbon atom

and you can just make out how they are arranged in a hexagonal pattern.

Graphene is two dimensional

and that's what gives it its unique properties.

This material, despite being one atom thick,

it's already conducting and that was sort of eureka moment

when I first realised that this material is worth studying.

In the hi-tech, dust-free clean labs at Manchester,

Andre's team are developing transistors made from graphene.

Graphene could ultimately replace silicon chips,

creating the next generation of super-fast computers,

up to 100 times faster than today's.

And we're only just beginning to imagine the vast possibilities

graphene opens up in other fields of science.

There's a sense in which anything is possible,

that only our imaginations will limit what we can create.

Our modern world is shaped by stuff we've made ourselves.

Built of steel, concrete and glass,

and at its heart,

the plastics that dominate our lives.

The apparent triumph of the man-made over the natural world.

There's no doubt that

laboratory designed materials have been impressive.

And so it's tempting to think they'll dominate the future.

But there's an intriguing new way of designing materials

that promises something different.

And it involves going back to nature.

It's easy to forget that artificial plastics

were first inspired by the raw materials of nature.

But now we're returning to this approach,

this time tapping into the designs nature has created

from 4 billion years of evolution.

We're learning to examine the natural world

from the material science perspective

and as we unlock its secrets,

we're finding the inspiration for a whole new generation of materials,

superior to anything we've yet created.

If you know where to look,

you can find creatures that do very special things.

Have a look at this guy.

He's a little beetle called a green dock beetle

and he can just hang upside down on the underside of a leaf

for as long as he likes.

Can walk straight up vertical walls.

Things that we can only dream of doing as humans.

Professor Stanislav Gorb is a zoologist at the University of Kiel.

And over the last ten years, he has been experimenting with beetles

and other insects, to analyse their ability

to stick to all types of surfaces.

As you see, we bind it on a human hair

So you've attached it to a hair, so it won't disappear,

you can go for a walk on this bit of glass.

OK. Wow. So it's happy upside down?

Absolutely.

Its own weight is about 11 milligrams

-so I put 300 milligrams.

-300!

So it's about 30 times heavier than the beetle. And it's fine.

That's amazing. So have you trained the beetle to do that?

-No. It's trained by nature!

-OK.

So millions of years of evolution

have allowed it to be able to walk upside down.

That's right.

Sticking to glass upside down

and supporting 30 times your own body weight is impressive.

How the beetle does this

is all to do with the microscopic structures on its feet.

And these are inspiring Professor Gorb's designs

for a brand new material.

Here you see this zoomed in area of the foot from here.

And what you see here are the hairs.

Then if you further zoom in, that is what I do now,

you see that every single hair is terminated by a little pad.

There's no glue involved,

these pads at the end of the hairs on the beetle's feet

enable it to make really good contact

with the surface it wants to stick to.

And that's giving it what appears to be this miraculous stickiness,

that it's able to walk up walls or upside down?

That's absolutely right.

This structure is built to generate good contact

and contact is the key point to generate strong stickiness.

Taking the beetle's feet as his inspiration,

Professor Gorb has worked with a German technology firm

to design an adhesive tape made from silicon rubber.

It's an entirely synthetic material, but designed to stick

just like the beetle's feet, using microscopic hairs.

So it's got no adhesive on it at all? It's just hairs.

It's no different chemical.

This is just a material very similar to normal silicon rubber.

There is nothing special about the chemistry,

it sticks just because of the structures.

Actually you can really feel it. It's quite a strange feeling.

-It's a sort of dry stickiness.

-Yes.

The screen on the left shows a microscopic image

of the beetle's hairs.

And the screen on the right shows the tape

that Professor Gorb's team has developed.

Both have the same essential design features.

You see very similar kind of structure.

They're a little bit larger, compared to the beetle.

On a micro-scale,

-you've reproduced the same structure as on the beetle's legs?

-Right.

Professor Gorb is very confident about his beetle-inspired tape...

..and has set-up an experiment to show me what it can do.

Right, so this is your tape with the artificial beetle hairs?

That's right.

And I'm going to hang upside down on the ceiling.

Exactly. I will just assist you.

So you see how the contacts are formed.

So the little hairs are being pressed into the glass.

They are your real contact.

I want to make it properly contact.

So you're sure this is going to work, are you?

I mean, it's one thing to see tape sticking to table

but it's quite another risking life and limb.

Although I do very much want to be a beetle.

So I just hang off this, do I?

Yes. One, two, three!

It works! It works. You're an absolute genius.

Who would have believed it? I know how Spiderman feels, finally!

This beetle-inspired sticky tape shows how designs found in nature

can inspire the creation of new materials.

But there is a more profound way

in which the relationship between artificial materials and nature

is being redefined.

In the future, the boundary between living and non-living materials,

those that we've created, will become ever more blurred.

The area where this will be most striking is medicine,

and the materials we design to be implanted in us.

These are all biomaterials,

man-made materials designed to go inside the body.

This is an artificial hip joint made of titanium.

This is a really extraordinary object, a piece of sculpture.

And this is an artificial knee joint. It's a great object.

And this is an X-ray of dental fillings.

If you like sweets, you've definitely got one of these.

Now, one thing these have all got in common

is that they're designed to be biologically inert in the body,

so not to interact with the body at all.

But the next generation of biomaterials

is going to do the exact opposite.

It's going to interact with our living cells.

And many of them are going to be made of plastics.

At the moment, artificial knee and hip joints

are the best surgical option for patients

with severely damaged cartilage.

However, that may be about to change.

Professor Molly Stevens of Imperial College London

is developing a biomaterial made of plastic

that could mean that in the future

artificial joints will no longer be needed.

She's developed a plastic that,

when inserted into damaged cartilage,

helps it to regenerate and repair itself.

On the bottom of the screen is a piece of real cartilage tissue.

And above this is the plastic biomaterial

that Molly's team has developed.

This is actually an artificial material,

that we've designed and that we've made,

so that it can be used to help damaged cartilage repair itself

inside the body.

This is a bit like a scaffold structure that you'd have

as you were building up a building.

It looks quite solid to the eye,

but it's actually made up of many, many, many small fibres.

A microscope reveals how the scaffold works.

So essentially, in green what you can see are these artificial fibres

that we've made and they form the bulk of the scaffold structure.

And what's really key here is, you can see in blue we have some cells.

And these cells are really healthy, and they're alive

and they're able to attach to this artificial material

and over time they would essentially grow all over it,

grow right into it and use these fibres as support for them

to then form healthy, new cartilage tissue.

So you're creating a microenvironment

where these cells like to live?

Yes.

So our scaffold structure with these fibres in the green

is actually a temporary structure.

So this will only be there as long as we need it to be,

so that the cells can go in, grow their own new cartilage

and then these fibres will dissolve away.

So the end result is that,

rather than being left with an artificial structure in your body,

you're actually left with your own regenerated cartilage.

But if that's not impressive enough,

Molly's team is also exploring

how materials can actually control cells.

These cells have been grown on materials

with different patterned surfaces,

and this is making them take what, for cells,

are extremely bizarre shapes.

From circles to squares to even triangles.

This is obviously quite an unnatural shape.

So a cell will normally stick to a material and it will spread out.

In this particular case, we've made some material on the surface

in the shape of a triangle that's very cell friendly.

So the cell likes this particular bit of material and sticks to that

and then it essentially just spreads out and assumes

the exact shape of the friendly material we've put underneath it.

These are all stem cells, cells which are able to specialise

into bone or fat or other types of cells.

And what's fascinating is that

the shape the stem cell is made to take by the material,

appears to affect what it becomes.

One of the amazing things is that if we make that shape

the triangle, the square or the circle

and we keep the exact same area,

and the cell will stick on it and assume those different shapes,

it will actually influence how the cell then specialises

or differentiates.

So, for example, this stem cell that is on a triangle

is more likely to go on and form a bone-like cell

than a cell on the circle

which is more likely to go on and form a fat cell.

Why triangular cells should be more likely to become bone cells,

or circular cells to become fat cells, is not yet fully understood.

But there's no doubt that on this frontier of material science

there are groundbreaking discoveries to be made.

At the heart of our modern world

are the man-made materials that we've created to fit our needs.

By trying to better nature, we've developed a whole family

of fantastic plastic materials that have transformed our lives.

Perhaps now is the turn of biologists to help bring us

the materials of tomorrow.

Instead of stuff that is static and lifeless,

the materials of the future

will build themselves and heal themselves.

They'll adapt to their environment,

will blur the boundary between what's living and what's man-made,

between what makes us, and what we make.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd