Stuff Matters Excerpt by Mark Miodownik The fundamental importance of materials to us is apparent from the names we hav used to categorize the stages of civilization the Stone Age Bronze Age and Iron Age with each new era of human existence being brought about by a new mate Steel was the defining material of the Victorian era allowing engineers to give full re their dreams of creating suspension bridges railways steam engines and passenge liners The great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel used it to transform the landsca and sowed the seeds of modernism The twentieth century is often hailed as the Age Silicon after the breakthrough in materials science that ushered in the silicon chip ar the information revolution Yet this is to overlook the kaleidoscope of other new mate that also revolutionized modern living at that time Architects took mass produced sh glass and combined it with structural steel to produce skyscrapers that invented a ne type of city life Product and fashion designers adopted plastics and transformed our homes and dress Polymers were used to produce celluloid and ushered in the bigge change in visual culture for a thousand years the cinema The development of aluminum alloys and nickel superalloys enabled us to build jet engines and fly cheap thus accelerating the collision of cultures Medical and dental ceramics allowed us to rebuild ourselves and redefine disability and aging and as the term plastic surgery implies materials are often the key to new treatments used to repair our faculties hip replacements Gunther von Hagens s Body Worlds exhibitions also testify to the cultur influence of new biomaterials inviting us to contemplate our physicality in both life an death 1 The author includes the new materials that revolutionized modern living to suggest that the twentieth century is more scientific than past centuries B defined by more than one material considered the most successful period Ounchanged by past materials 2 The author organizes the excerpt by A presenting in chronological order the stages of civilization B explaining how each era received its name