Great Technology from 1867: Fire Engines and Mechanical Reapers
Innovation and discovery as chronicled in Scientific American
By Daniel C. Schlenoff | Scientific American September 2017 Issue
1967
Solid-State Science
“If you take a paper clip and bend it, it stays bent; it doesn't spring back and it doesn't break. The metal of which the clip is made is said to be ductile. If you try to bend a glass rod (unless you are holding it in a flame), it will simply break. It is said to be brittle. In this respect, as in many others, glass behaves quite differently from a metal. The difference must lie either in the particular atoms of which metals and glass are made up or in the way they are put together—probably both. Students of such matters naturally want to understand the reasons for these differences in behavior. During the past 20 years studies of this kind have been called solid-state physics, or sometimes, since the subject includes a great deal of chemistry, just ‘solid state.’ It is a major branch of science that has revealed new and previously unsuspected properties in materials. An example is the properties of semiconductors, knowledge of which has given rise to a flood of technological devices such as the transistor. —Sir Nevill Mott”
Mott shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on materials.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/great-technology-from-1867-fire-engines-and-mechanical-reapers/
