(gentle whirring) (audience applauding)
(jazzy live music) - Hello! How good was that? Welcome, welcome, welcome,
welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Anna and welcome to "A Materials and Making Odyssey." What is that? We are about to find out. Welcome to the Royal Institution. As you've seen, this a really a building that is steeped in scientific history and it is such an exciting
place for me to come and talk to you about my love for science. I found out recently that 10 elements from the periodic table were discovered or first isolated in this very building. (audience woohs)
Yes, correct. And when I thought up the idea
of doing something like this, of putting on a big celebration
of materials and making, the Royal Institution really was the thing that came to
the very top of my head. You are gonna see the hard work of so many different people here tonight, particularly the RI's demo teams. I've been throwing so many
weird and silly ideas at them over the last few weeks and
their attitude has always been, "Yep, let's just do it!" So I really, I'm very, very excited to show you the results of that. Everything from propane,
we've got liquid nitrogen. Every time I ask them for
a dewar of liquid nitrogen, they come on and they say, "Also, did you know that James Dewar invented the dewar in this very building?" It's a lot of fun! There'll be a lot of that here tonight. I'd like to start though by
thanking all of the makers that you saw around the
building this evening. Some of them have come from
really, really far away to come and demonstrate their craft and I'm so, so grateful to all of them. So can we give them a big round
of applause before we start? (audience applauding) Thank you. (applause dying down) I also need to introduce you
to my wonderful house band who are sitting in the front row. They're going to be interjecting at times. Sometimes I will ask them to do so if something is taking a while to heat up. This is gonna be slightly
ramshackle affair, so there may be some musical interludes while we wait for stuff to happen, but they've been practicing
really, really hard as well. And guys, I'm so grateful
for you being here. So thank you. (audience applauding) Okay, so now that we've locked the doors, I'm here to tell you that
this is a book launch. The RI told me that we are
not allowed to tell people that it's a book launch
before they buy tickets 'cause otherwise they won't come. (Anna chuckles)
(audience laughing) So, sorry. This is a book launch. This is the paperback
book launch of my book "Handmade: Assigned to Search
for Meaning through Making." The hardback came out in 2021 when it was kind of half
COVID lockdown, half not. And so I didn't get to do any live events. So this is, two years
later, the first time that I've stood in front of a live crowd to talk about my little lockdown baby. So thank you. Thank you for that. (audience applauding) Tonight my plan is to kind of really just tell you some stories. Some stories from the book
and to show you kind of, well, hopefully my love
for materials and making and get you inspired as well. So this book came about because I did a undergraduate in material science and I went on to do a PhD as well, and my PhD was in hydrogen
storage materials. Which until a few months ago,
nobody knew what that was. And then the movie "The
Glass Onion" came out where an evil genius
Elon Musk type character had a crystal of hydrogen
storage materials and was planning to take over the world, which was annoying
'cause that was my plan. (Anna chuckles)
(audience chuckles) So they've made a movie about that now, which is quite annoying 'cause, yeah, I would've liked to have starred in that. But what I found though when I was starting to work on hydrogen was that I would come home and I'd tell my friends and family that I was working on hydrogen, and they either thought I was trying to solve the Hindenberg disaster or that I was building bombs. Neither of which was true. In my mind, I was trying to save the world with green energy using hydrogen. But I realized very early on that public perception of science was gonna be crucially important to the kind of success of my research. So I started getting interested
in public engagement. I started off by doing standup comedy, and actually this book opens with, my very first attempt at standup comedy is in the first few pages. You can probably feel the anxiety steeping through the pages. And that then took me on
to kind of learning about how to sort of understand audiences, that quickly took me to storytelling, 'cause I ran out of jokes about hydrogen so I had to quickly start
telling other stories. And I started kind of, like I said, getting interested in public engagement. And night after night I would stand up and I would tell audiences
what material science is, and I say something like this. What we do in material
science is we like to zoom in and we look at all sorts
of stuff to zoom into, metals, plastics, ceramics,
glasses, composites, substances from the natural world, and we zoom in all the way
down to the scale of the atom. I'm not very good at drawing, by the way. That's sort of part of the book as well. We zoom in down to the scale of the atom and we look for clues about
why the behavior of atoms and what's going on down there can explain how materials behave
at the kind of human scale, at the scale of the
microphone, for example. And so we look at what element from the periodic table those atoms are, we also look at the forces
of physics between them and how strongly they
bond together or not, and then we also look at the
engineering of materials, and so how these atoms form structures sometimes inside materials. Sometimes in stuff like metals and glass, sorry, metals and ice, you will have atoms that are all lined up in a really neat and rigid
and beautiful symmetry of the positions of the
atoms in those materials. Whereas in stuff like glass
and sometimes plastic, it's kind of higgledy
piggledy in a random mess. And all that stuff, the
chemistry of the atoms, the physics of the bonding and the engineering of their structures, we use to explain why materials are the way we find them, right? So why a microphone, the
casing of it made of steel would mean that it feels cool to the touch because of what's happening
in the atoms inside. Why steel is strong and hard and tough and why we would build
buildings out of it. And the behavior of atoms as well can explain why materials
like rubber, for example, are soft and stretchy. And it's all to do with what's going on at the very tiniest of scales. Now, until a few years ago,
this was all I really knew about the science of materials, right? Looking at the very tiniest of atoms and extrapolating that
to materials' properties. Then I had what I can only describe as a crushing realization, and that was, it came about 'cause I was
working in the lab one day, I was holding this big
long, relatively expensive glass test tube and I turned
around like that into the wall and this test tube just
smashed everywhere. Now this was not an unusual occurrence, I have to say, particularly in my lab. Stuff gets broken all the time. But what I had to do having
broken this test tube was to go off to get it fixed. So off I went to the chemistry department to try and get this test tube fixed. And I knocked on the door. There was a very special person
in the chemistry department, which was the resident glassblower. And I said, "Hello, sorry. Please, can you fix my test tube?" He said, "Yeah, come on in,
I'll do it for you now." And so he sat down and he got his torch and he started heating the material. And I watched him as he
did it and took some tongs and sort of coaxed this gooey, beautifully transparent liquid back into the shape of a test tube. And in that moment, like I say, I had a terrifying revelation, which was that by night
I had been telling people that I was an expert in materials, right? What I've just told you basically. But I had absolutely no idea whatsoever what this person was doing,
how he was able to understand the temperature of the
material, how it moved, how to relate, how to
make it with his hands. I had no idea about that side of things. And so I thought, "How can I stand up and tell people that I'm
an expert in materials if I can't even do this?" And so that set me off on a journey. And I set out and I talked
to nearly 100 crafts people like potters and stone
masons and blacksmiths. You've met some of them tonight. Bakers, people that know about materials from a kind of hands-on perspective. 'Cause what I wanted to
do was to glean from them their knowledge base of materials and to hopefully fill in
a bit of the gaps in mine. And then one day, a few years later, I went on a swimming holiday
and I met a woman called Laura. And we were sitting down at dinner one day and Laura was like, "Oh, what do you do?" And I said, "Oh, I've got a podcast." (audience chuckles) The podcast used to be called, it is called "Handmade" now, by the way, but in the early days it
was called "'Rial Talk." Which is spelled 'R-I-A-L
Talk, like "material." But a visual pun for an audio
medium is not a good idea. So we changed the name eventually. But anyway, I was telling
her about "'Rial Talk" and she said, "Hey, if you
ever wanna write a book, then I could be your agent." She is a literary agent.
She wasn't just like, "Hey!" And I was like, "Yeah, that'd be amazing. Oh my God, I'd love to write a book." And so she helped me to
write up the book proposal and then eventually my book came around. And so what my plan is
tonight is to tell you a little bit about some of
the stories from this book. Because when I came down
to actually sit down to write this thing, I had
another crushing realization. This is my life, guys. Just crushing realization after another. I sat down to write this
book and I was like, "Huh, why should anyone care?" Right? Why should anyone care about how the atoms and the engineering and the structures and the other properties,
why should anyone care? And I thought, "Well, I care
and I care about this stuff because it influences my life," right? All of the materials around
us tell stories in our lives. And so that was gonna be my in. I thought if I could show my readers the stories that these materials have created in my own life, that maybe it would serve as a
bit of a mirror to my readers and that they would
then start to recognize the stories that were told by
materials in their lives too. And so that's my plan for us
together here tonight as well, is to tell you a few of these stories, and there's some books
outside for sale afterwards. So let's start with where
it all began with glass. (playful live music) It's gonna keep happening, so... (audience applauding)
(Anna chuckles) So I went off on this quest
to meet a load of makers and actually have a go, get my hands dirty with their crafts. And the first maker that
I met was a glassblower. And this was a problem though, right? This whole idea to go and
meet these craftspeople and have a go and get
my hands dirty, right? Because I was a scientist
for a reason, guys. The reason was as a very small child, I had an incredibly traumatic
life event, which was- It's actually not. Sorry to make that serious. It's not. It's kind of
a funny and weird one. The traumatic life event involved, in my school arts and crafts
lesson we had to make cushions and I wanted to make my cushion in the shape of my new pet rabbit, Daisy, who was a lovely black and white rabbit, very, very sweet. And so I sat down, sharpened my pencil, drew the shape of a rabbit, cut it out, cut out some fabric, stuffed
it, drew a rabbit's face. (Anna laughing)
(audience laughing) Now to be fair, you can't tell if this is just my artist's
impression of the cushion or if it actually looked like this. My parents are here tonight
and they can tell you. I think it's probably a bit of both. My artistic skills have not improved since the rabbit cushion, but my entire class fell
about laughing at me. They pointed and laughed and said, "Ha! That doesn't look like a rabbit!" And to be fair, it doesn't. But I was incredibly upset by this 'cause yeah, I thought of
myself as a capable young woman who could do anything she set her mind to, apart from arts and crafts. So then herein lies my problem, right? I need to fill in the gap
in my materials knowledge, it lies with the realm
of the craftspeople, but how am I gonna do that
without getting my hands dirty and beating my nemesis of meeting my arts and crafts nemesis? So I set out and I met lots
of different craftspeople, the first one was a glassblower. And I'm gonna start off by telling you a little bit about what glass is. We'll do a little bit of material science and then I'll show you
kind of how glass works. Show you what I learned
from this glassblower. So glass is a material
that's made out of atoms, like all of them are. In some materials like metals and materials that are just
kind of one thing, one element, the atoms inside those materials just kind of exist as themselves. But in other materials, like glass, the atoms form little groups of atoms which are called molecules. And that's the case in glass. So the molecules in silica
are silicon molecules, there's silicons, and
there's oxygens in there. And then those little
arrangements of atoms, those molecules then
form bigger arrangements inside different materials. Now there's one weird thing with glass, and I'm gonna show you
what that weird thing is by heating up some glass and doing a little bit of glass blowing. So here's a Pyrex tube made of glass and what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna start heating... (blowtorch roaring) I'm gonna start heating this glass tube. Now when you heat glass, you have to introduce it
to the flame quite slowly, and I'm gonna explain why in a minute. But you sort of wanna
bring it in quite far away. And then you have to rotate it as well as you introduce it to the
hottest part of the flame. And the weird thing about glass
is that glass doesn't melt. You always think of
glass when it gets soft, you would think that
that was molten glass, but technically glass doesn't
melt even when you heat it up and even when it's flowing
around in a liquid. And the reason that glass doesn't melt is its atomic structure. So if you can see from my little diagram, the atoms in glass, the molecules in glass are
randomly oriented, right? There's no real structure to them. They're just sort of in
there all higgledy piggledy. And that's very different
from other sorts of materials like quartz and ice and metals. In those materials, the atoms are in what we
call a crystal structure. In crystal structures, there's
a very neat order to it. There's lovely symmetry, as you can see from my
little diagram of quartz. And so in those sorts
of materials like ice, we all know ice. When you heat ice to zero
degrees, it melts right? And that happens because all
of the atomic bonds in ice are identical. So at exactly zero degrees, that's enough energy to
make those bonds break and to form water. But in glass it's different. In glass there is no... All of the bonds have kind
of different strengths. There is no one particular
structure to melt. And so what happens is as you heat it up over a few hundred degrees,
the bonds gradually break. And so the material goes
from being a little bit hard, well, very hard initially, and then it gets softer
and softer and softer until eventually it starts
behaving like a liquid. But there is no one point,
there is no one melting point. So I think I've got my
glass hot enough now and what I'm gonna do, first
of all, it's just pinch it off. Okay, so now I've got a
little pinch in this glass, there's a seal there. I'm gonna heat it again and see if I can blow a
little bubble, which is fun. So I'm gonna heat it up a little bit along the side of it now. Can we have some musical
accompaniment for this? (groovy live music) Amazing, thanks, guys. Okay, ready? I'm gonna come
around here just so you can see. It's very small and it's probably not gonna blow up very big. But here we go. Oh, there's a gap in it, I can feel it. Well anyway, this is why I'm
not the expert glass person. But the interesting
thing about glass, right? When I went to these glassblowers
and I had a little go and I made something pretty
simple, a little bit like this, and I couldn't take it
away with me immediately because we had to do
what's called a kneeling. So when you take glass out of a flame, if it isn't Pyrex like this, you have to do exactly
like I did at the start by introducing it very slowly, you have to take it out of
the flame very slowly as well. And that is because with
all materials actually, almost all materials,
when you heat them up, they get a little bit
bigger, thermal expansion. And when you cool them down,
they get a little bit smaller. And this is because the atoms
inside are getting all excited and they're vibrating
around a little bit more and they're taking up more space, and so the whole material
takes up more space. It's kind of weird when
you think about it. But one risk that you have, if you heat up this part of the glass
really hot as I've just done and this part remains so
cold that you can touch it, there's a big temperature
differential across that material. And what can happen if this
part has expanded loads and this part hasn't, is that loads of strain is
set up inside the material and eventually it could shatter. And we can actually see
material strain in glass. I've got a different piece
of glass to show you now and we can see it because
glass is a material that has lots of weird- Oh, thanks. Lots of weird
optical properties, right? We use glass for, for example, cables to get the
internet into our houses. And it's able to interact with lights in lots of exciting ways. What I've got here to show you, if we can switch over to the projector. So what's happening here, there's a light underneath
and the camera's up here. And I've got a cross
polarizing filter on here, which means that all the
lights coming up here, when it passes through that
filter, it's a bit like, you know slats on blinds in a house? It passes through those and then it kind of goes
into lots of little lines. I've got exactly the same thing
here as a different sheet. And if I line this up one way, you can sort of see through it. But if I rotate it 90 degrees,
no light goes through at all because we've gone through
that way with this one and that way with that one, and what happens is there's
no light that gets through. What I've got here is
a tempered glass screen for an iPad or something like that. It's made of glass that has had a lot of internal strain put in it, because if you strain glass a lot, it becomes very, very hard and it makes it less likely to break. Because if you've got the atoms kind of pushed together a lot and and you try to crack it, the force of those atoms
being pushed together means that it's not likely
to crack very easily. So that's what I've got
here in a piece of glass. I'm gonna put it in between
the cross polarizers, and what you'll see is that it starts to let the light through. So that's very nice. But what it also does, glass is what we call a
birefringent material, which means it bends light. And so when it bends light,
you'll be able to see hopefully, as I move this material as I strain it, you'll be able to see
that it's bending light to such an extent that it's
causing a lovely little rainbow through our cross polarizers. And this is what would happen
if I were to take my glass rod out of the flame too much, this sort of strain would go into it. And if you strain it too much, then it can cause horrible
shattering catastrophe as I found actually with
my test tube from the lab. And this is really important to the history of science, actually, which is why I wanted to start with this, talking about the Royal
Institution, because science- Or rather glass is a material that has, it's always been a
friend of science, right? From the lenses that we use in microscopes to see the very, very small things, to the lenses that we use in telescopes to see very, very big things. And chemistry labs, if
you go into any lab, it's filled with glass, and the reason is that
it's brilliant, right? We can see through it and we can see our
experiments happening in it and we can heat it up to
very high temperatures. But that was really only the case for the last 150 or so years, because before that they didn't have a special type of glass that wouldn't do the expansion and
contraction thing reliably. So before the 1880s, all
chemistry experiments were a little bit of a risk to your life because you would be
heating up your glass thing and maybe all of a sudden it would smash. And then in 1880, a guy called Otto Shot invented what's called borosilicate glass, which you might know as Pyrex. And Pyrex is designed to have absolutely no thermal expansion
coefficient whatsoever. So that means that you can heat
one side of your Pyrex dish as hot as you like at the back of the oven and the other half can be hanging out of the front of the oven and
nothing is gonna go wrong. And scientists adopted
this really, really quickly because they realized that they could then have their experiments in stuff that wasn't then going to explode and throw their dangerous
equipment all the way around. So that's glass. Like I say, glass has
had a very, very long and happy history with with science. I don't know. Thank you. So when I first tried glass blowing, I was a little bit anxious
because this was a material that could blow up in my face, it was very, very hot, blah, blah, blah. And also there was this thing
in the back of my mind of, "Ah, this is gonna involve
some sort of creativity. There's a real craftsperson next to me who's a professional creative." And she was like, "Yeah,
just make whatever you want!" And I was like, "I don't know what I want! I don't know, I don't
have any creativity." But what was good about glass was that because when you
heat it up it kind of flows and it sort of flops around on its own, you can actually make
something that looks quite nice without knowing at all what you're doing. It will just kind of
form something lovely. And because when you heat it up, it burns off all of the
horrible finger marks and stuff, when you glass blow for the first time what I found was that I
was able to make something relatively nice relatively quickly. So that that kind of
bolstered my confidence as I went forth on my quest and had to go at other materials. So the next material I wanna
talk to you about is plastic. (dramatic live piano) ♪ That sucks ♪ (audience laughing) - So the story of plastic is
a story of my Polish granddad. You may have noticed on the way in that I've got a Polish surname. That's because of my Polish granddad. I grew up in Britain in Bedford, and growing up in Britain
with a Polish surname occasionally caused some embarrassment when I have to talk to people
on the phone, spell it out, all those sorts of things,
people pronouncing it, people having to spell it. It's been interesting, but it did have some
advantages as well growing up. I can remember being the first in my class to disappoint everyone and tell
them that Santa wasn't real when Santa Claus turned up in my house speaking with a really
strong Polish accent. So that was my first instance
of amateur sleuthing, and then Granddad George
showed up five minutes later. But I always remember Granddad George as being a very kind of, sort of very big figure in my childhood, but also quite a mysterious one as well. Obviously he was an old
man, as you can see. it's not Santa. By the time that I kind of was a child and so I heard lots of
sort of family whisperings of all of his life story, which had been kind of a lot
of sort of family legends around Granddad George's life story. And when it came to think of a story to write for the book about plastic, I immediately thought of Granddad George because Granddad George was born in 1910, which was just a few months after the first synthetic
plastic called Bakelite that was invented in 1909 by a guy called Leo Baekeland in New York. And Granddad George lived to nearly 100. So he lived for basically the
whole of the 20th century. And so from the birth of plastic and the birth of Granddad George, he sort of saw plastic take over our entire material world
throughout the 20th century. And luckily for me, I'm writing a book, Granddad George had written his memoirs and we had a copy of them in the house. And so I sat down and I read through Granddad George's life story. And as I read through it trying to find sort of material links, what I found was that his life story was constantly impacted by
the material of plastic. And so the story of plastic for me is inextricably linked with
the story of Granddad George. There are so many different stories that I could tell you of him. I could take a whole hour just on him, so I'll do the brief version for you. He was born in Moscow in
1910, as family legend has it, because his mother was there at the time, and he spent his early
childhood in Moscow. When the Russian Revolution
started to kick off, him and his family became refugees and they had to flee to the East along the Trans Siberian Railway. George was about seven
years old by this point. He had his younger sister
and his mother and his father and they were all on this refugee train. It was very, very slow. And around the halfway
point through Russia in a town called Novosibirsk, George became separated from his family. So in the middle of Siberia,
in the middle of winter 1918, in the middle of the Russian Revolution George found himself
completely on his own, and nearly a year later he
caught up with his family later down the line. That's another whole family story. But they eventually
caught up with each other. They went through China and then to Japan, and he spent a few of his
childhood years living in Japan before eventually returning to Warsaw where he spent his teenage years. So teenage years around the 1920s, there was lots of stuff
starting to happen with plastic. The scene was being set, if you like, for plastic to suddenly become the massive material that it is today. Three things happened. The first thing was the
chemical recognition of plastics as a family of materials. So a guy called Hermann
Staudinger, a German chemist, came up with a term, the
idea that you could have little molecules, which
he called monomers, and you could then click these together like Lego in long chains and those would be called polymers, and that process would
be called polymerization. So in the early 1920s, him
and others were working on the kind of chemistry of this stuff and he worked out that you could have the same monomers all in a line or you could have alternating
monomers all in a line or randomly distributed ones or ones with branches coming off. There were all these different, this sort of big range of
ways that materials could be, but all of them had in common
that they were long chains. Added to that, you can have polymer chains that are in a wiggly
squiggly snake pattern, which makes a kind of crystal, which can melt, as we saw
in the previous chapter, or an amorphous structure where they're all kind of like spaghetti all mushed in together. There are so many different
permutations for plastics. But what Hermann Staudinger did was recognize that all of them together behave similarly enough
that you could call them a family of materials. So that was the first thing, the recognition of the
chemistry of these materials. The second thing was the
engineering of mass production. So the building of machines
that could form and melt and extract the raw
materials for this stuff, which set the scene for it to become a massive, massive industry. And the third thing that
happened was brands got involved. So brands like Rolls Royce
and Harrods of London started making plastic stuff
and marketing it to people as the next new amazing
futuristic type material. It was seen as a luxury at that point. So those three things
were going on in plastics while Granddad George was living out his teenage years in Warsaw. He had always loved flying, he'd always been fascinated by aircraft, and he studied engineering,
aeronautical engineering at Warsaw Technical University. After he graduated, he
went on to go and work in what he wrote in his memoirs
as an airscrew factory, which is basically a factory
that makes airplane parts. And that takes us up in the
story to 1939 in Warsaw, when for the second time in George's life he was in the wrong
place at the wrong time and became a refugee for
the second time in his life. And this time he went South. South through sort of the
Baltic states down to Greece, from there he got on a boat to Marseille, from Marseille to Paris, and in Paris he worked as
an aeronautical designer, designing aircraft for the Allies. When Paris looked like
it was going to fall, him and his mate, Stan, bought motorbikes, and they were trying to
get to British territory but they couldn't go
North, so they went south. They were trying to get to Gibraltar. At one point I think they got arrested, someone thought they
were a spy or something, but anyway, they made
it down to Gibraltar. But around Gibraltar was a military zone. No one could get into Gibraltar, but they only had Spanish transit visas that lasted three days. So with their visas running out, they had no other choice
but to get on a boat over to the North African coast. From there they took a taxi to Casablanca. And in Casablanca, George got on a boat that was sailing off into the Atlantic. Didn't know where it was going. And by this point, he only
had a few possessions, they sold the motorbikes, and he had what he was wearing, right? The clothes that he'd been wearing for the last couple of weeks, some papers, a packet of
cigarettes, and one luxury item, which was an inflatable mattress, like a kind of Lilo like
you'd have at the beach. He had this inflatable rubber mattress. And this item, I think,
tells us a lot about what was going on with
plastics at the time. Because around that time, around the 1930s still plastics were, they
were sort of on the rise, but we were still relying on kind of the traditional ones that we'd
been using for a long time, namely the ones that come
from natural sources. So natural rubber that
comes from the rubber tree and silk that comes from silk worms. The principle too that
were particularly useful for kind of the military
as well at that time. But the second World War
presented a massive problem for countries that
couldn't grow rubber trees and for countries that didn't have a whole lot of silkworms knocking around. They didn't have these
really important substances because all of the trade
routes at that time were broken down. So chemists in Europe and
places like North America were tasked with, "Can you
create a synthetic version of natural rubber or of silk?" And we see in the 1930s and 1940s a massive explosion in the invention of stuff like nylon and polyurethane, stuff that mimicked the natural stuff but that you could make in a lab in Europe and didn't have to rely
on trade routes for. So I always think of the second World War as being a really pivotal
moment for plastics because it's what really taught
us how to mass produce stuff that didn't rely on natural materials. So Granddad George's rubber lilo mattress was his kind of prized
possession on this boat. Like I say, he didn't
know where it was going, it set off in the middle of the night. A few weeks later he ended
up in Nova Scotia in Canada. Some people got off the boat there, Granddad George didn't get off the boat. I don't why. It came back over the
other side of the Atlantic and he landed in Cardiff
Docks in September, 1945. From there, he came to London and worked for the rest of the war as an aircraft designer as well. After the war, it still wasn't really safe to return to Poland. He met his wife, he started
a family in West London, and there weren't really that many jobs in designing aircraft
anymore after the war. And so resident in a
relatively strange new country, he turned to a relatively
strange new material in order to survive, and
that material was plastic. Him and another Polish
friend started a company making plastic goods like
everyday household goods. This is an advert for a coal bucket, which tells you a lot about
the time, but made of plastic. And they called the company, by the way, Stewart Plastics Limited. Neither of them were called Stewart. Their surnames were very polish. Harry Stewart was their
foreman, their employee, but they called the company after him because even then they realized
that the SEO of Ploszajski was not going to be be good
business sense for them. And I can attest to that to this day. So Granddad George started
this plastics company and it went really well. They moved it to Croydon,
they employed loads of people, and it allowed him to settle and thrive in this country that he
eventually ended up staying in for the rest of his life. So during those latter decades
then, the '50s, '60s, '70s, plastics just... Everything turned to plastics, right? The textiles that people were wearing, the packaging that their
food was being produced in, even Granddad George's beloved aircraft eventually became plastic composites. And the reason was that
in the post-war period, plastics were cheap, they
were readily available, you could make them at home. Not home-home, but you
know, in the country. Don't try this at home! And so it kind of helped particularly countries like Britain get back on their feet after the war. And so Granddad George and
people in his generation saw this transformation
of the material world from textiles and metals and
ceramics to ubiquitous plastic. And by the time that he died
in his care home in 2007, everything around him had
transformed into plastics, right? The carpets, the windows, his TV, the cups that he was drinking
with, everything was plastic. And we know this now, of course, because we live in that modern world that is built of plastic. But it wasn't until I was born
in the 1990s in that story that we started to actually realize that this may not be such a
sustainable way of making stuff. Only in the 1990s did
people start thinking, "Hang on a minute. We keep throwing this stuff away and it's just building up in landfill." And the plastics producers
at that time were like, "Hang on a minute. We keep making this stuff and
it keeps ending up in landfill and people are getting annoyed at us." So what we should do is tell
them that they can recycle it and then we look good 'cause it looks like a green material." But they knew even from
the very earliest point that large scale melting down
of plastics to recycle them was never ever going to
be economically viable. And I've got a little demo
here to show you what, to kind of show you that demonstration. Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. So what I've got here, I don't know if there's any Gen Z'ers in. This is a CD. We used to play music on these. And obviously made of plastic. This is the same thing, but that's had the aluminum shiny thing, shiny foil part scratched off. And what I'm gonna do is
I'm just gonna heat it up and sort of show you. So when we talk about recycling plastics, we talk about heating them up, reforming them, and
then making new fleeces out of bottles or whatever. That's not really what happens. So when you heat up plastic. You can try this at
home if you're careful. When you heat up plastic, the
intermolecular bonds break, those bonds between the molecules,
and it starts to soften, the crystalline parts start to melt. And... (Anna blowing) (audience gawking) (audience applauding) You can make like a beautiful
jellyfish out of an old CD. This is not good for playing
music with anymore, is it? And so when we talk
about recycling plastics and we talk about melting them down and making new stuff with them, what we can make with them
is not that useful, really. The materials properties degrade, it becomes weaker and kind of pointless. I don't know why I did that. And so recycling has got a
long way to go basically. But the good news is that- Well, the reason the recycling's
got a long way to go, we saw earlier, right? Plastic isn't just one type of material, it's loads of different types of materials and all of them have different
molecular structures, all of the ways that the molecules are in there are different, all of the monomers can
can be different as well. You can also have additives
in there like dyes. Once you do all of that, it's impossible, nearly impossible to then
kind of go back on that and get the raw materials out again. But technically there's no
reason why we can't do that. It's more, I think, a
kind of societal problem of having to do all of the
sorting out part first. There's no chemical reason why
we can't really do recycling. And I'm actually quite optimistic that, although this looks quite bad, the problems that I've described to you are not problems that material scientists aren't used to solving already. So I'm pretty confident
that we will kind of sort out this waste problem, but it is gonna be a massive
problem for our generation. And it's one that I hope with
sort of engineering geniuses like Granddad George, we will
solve that problem together. But it also kind of shows us that science isn't just a
kind of scientific problem, it also interfaces with
societal problems as well. And that's what I learned from plastic. (groovy live music) Okay, let's talk about steel. Steel is kind of a titan
of the material world. At least in material science
undergraduate courses we spend so much time talking about steel! There are still people researching new things to know about steel. Even though we invented it
over a hundred years ago. It's 'cause it's so
industrially important, it's also very materially interesting. But my first exposure to steel other than learning about it
in my undergrad labs, was... My impression of it was that it was a very kind of macho material. It was a very kind of, 'cause
it's tough, it's strong, it's engineering! That's what men sound like. (audience laughing) That was my first impression of it. The reason that that was my
first impression was that my first sort of real life
exposure to steel was here. These are the Bonneville Salt Flats, which are on the border
of Utah and Nevada. And in the summer of 2011, while I was in my second
year of university, I got the chance to be part
of a land speed racing team who were attempting to
break land speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats. And the team that I was with, we were trying to break
the record in this car. This is a one liter
streamliner engine car. Streamliner means that the
driver's like this in the front. One liter is a very small, it's actually a motorbike
engine that was taken out and put in this car. My first car was a 1.2 liter Fiat Punto that would scream at me if I
went above 65 on the motorway. This car, smaller engine, we were trying to get it
above 313 miles an hour. So, massive engineering challenge. The other challenge was
that on this team was me, aged 20, long blonde hair, vegetarian, studying for material
science at university, and then five Glaswegian car mechanics. So the team dynamic was
a little bit strange, but we were all united in this task of trying to break this land speed record and we had only seven days to do it in. So we camped out on these
salt flats for a week, and every day we'd be working
on this car, trying to get it, push the engineering components
beyond their limits, really, to try and get it to
go really, really fast. We had various, I would say, teething problems to start with. Wrong fuel in the tank. We've all been there! What else? Oh, wrong
plug in the wrong socket. At one point there was
an electrical failure, which meant that there wasn't any brakes because the brakes are just
parachutes that fly out the back and that's triggered by a little button that apparently wasn't working. So those sorts of things. But by day four of seven
we were starting to kind of get into the groove of
it and starting to get fast. And so on one particular occasion, an attempt at the record on day four, the driver took the car from
first gear to second gear, going fast, second gear to third gear, third gear to fourth gear, and then something in
the engine went bang. Can I get a rim shot, Joe? (rim shot echoes quietly) Yeah, atmosphere. Something in the engine went bang. So the driver came to
the side of the salt lake and we got the car back to the pit stops and opened out the engine and out of the engine
fell a kind of waterfall of glittery black engine oil. And I was informed by the real engineers that engine oil shouldn't be glittery. The glitter in that engine oil was what had previously been
the components of the gearbox, now shredded on the beautiful
white crystalline ground. Which constituted a problem. So I wandered over and I picked out two tiny little pieces of metal. I've taken a photo of them here for you. And I sort of wiped the engine oil off and I noticed something very interesting. These are probably
about a centimeter long, and what they are is if
you imagine a gear cog, a circular gear cog and there's
lots of little ridges on it, these are those little teeth. Each one of those is a ridge that had been kinda
stripped off of fourth gear. And I noticed something very
interesting about these. The first thing, if you
look at the fracture surface on the right hand side there, that's what I would expect
steel to break like. This very much looks like what
is called ductile fracture. In ductile fracture when
materials like steel break, they kind of, if you
see it in slow motion, they kind of pull apart
and they sort of bend and flow a little bit before they tear and you end up with a very
sort of rough fracture surface. Now, you will have experienced
this sort of fracture if you've ever tried to share
a Snickers bar with a friend. Why would you share? No. If you have ever attempted this, right? If you try and break a Snickers
bar, it doesn't snap right? It kind of pulls apart very slowly and you end up with a very
kind of rough fracture surface. You can picture the scene, I'm sure. So this is how I would expect
steel to break as well. A very sort of rough fracture surface. Fine. That that's what I would expect. But the mystery came with the other little
gear cog tooth thingy. And the other one, you can
see that the fracture surface is flat and shiny like a mirror. This should not have happened, right? Because this very flat
and shiny factor surface is like what you would expect if you broke a piece of dark chocolate. I should have unwrapped these before. If you break a piece of
dark chocolate, as you know, it just snaps, right? And you end up with a very
flat fracture surface. That's brittle fracture. So that's a mystery. That was really weird. Why did one of these pieces
of steel, identical materials, one break like ductile fracture and the other like brittle fracture? Well, there's two possible explanations. The first is temperature. Because if you break what are
normally ductile materials when they're extremely cold,
they go through what is called a brittle to ductile transition. So at room temperature
they can be ductile, and if we could have the
dewar, invented by James Dewar, of liquid nitrogen. Thank you very much! Thank you. Thank you, we are gonna
take a little Snickers and we're gonna stick it in the dewar invented by James Dewar
in this very building of liquid nitrogen in here, and it's just gonna cool
down for a couple of seconds and we're gonna see what
happens when it breaks. Oh, that's a big hammer. It's bigger than the one we practice with. That's fine. (laughs) (audience laughing) So it takes a little bit
of time to cool down. I can see the liquid nitrogen
is bubbling away in there. I actually don't know where it's gone. (audience laughing) This is a really fun game. Should probably use this other glove. Should we have some more
music to accompany this really quite boring... - One, two. One, two, three, four. (jazzy live music) - I found it. I found it. - [Audience] Yay! - Okay, so right, what we're gonna do is we're gonna see what
happens when a ductile material gets very cold. Oops. It's like that game. You ever done that? Anyway, doesn't matter. Ready? Should we have a countdown? - [Audience] Three, two, one! (audience gawking) (Anna exhales satisfied) (audience applauding) - Yeah, turns very brittle. Turns very brittle indeed. Steel does the same thing, by the way. When you cool steel down to
very, very cold temperatures, it turns brittle in the same way that a Snickers does as well. We tried this earlier with a steel bar. I wasn't strong enough to break it, but on the Titanic, the
reason that the Titanic's impact with the iceberg
was so catastrophic was that the steel that
the ship was made out of had gone through its brittle
to ductile transition. So when it hit the iceberg,
it didn't just dent like it would have if it was a bit warmer, it would've shattered like
our poor Snickers bar here. So that is the story of Jack
and Rose, unfortunately. It's all to do with the brittle to ductile transition temperature. If someone could call them, I solved it! (audience laughing) (Anna chuckles) So yes, that's one option,
right? Is temperature. But of course our give box components would not have been wildly cold like this. So the only other option, the only other solution to this mystery was the speed at which- I've got loads of Snickers
under here if anyone wants. Was the speed at which
the gear cog came off. 'Cause if you break a Snickers bar very, very, very quickly, it does the brittle thing
and not the ductile thing. Temperature's also slightly a factor, and I'm thinking now that maybe
this is gonna be too warm. So I'd say this has got a
50/50 success likelihood, but we'll find it out if it works. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and break the Snickers
bar very, very quickly off the side of this, and
hopefully what we'll see is that it will turn
from a ductile material into a brittle material. I'm gonna need a countdown
and a very steady hand. Ready? Three! - [Audience] Three, two, one! - Yes!
(audience cheering) (audience applauding) I don't where the other one- Oh, it's here. I'm not gonna pass this around in case anyone's got a nut allergy, but you heard it snap, right? It didn't do the ductile thing,
it did the brittle thing. And the these fracture surfaces are flat and shiny like a mirror. So this is what I think
happened inside the fourth gear, is that one of these components came off, probably the ductile one
came off slowly like normal, bounced around inside the
gearbox, smashed into number two. It didn't have time to do the
ductile bending flowing thing. Snapped off like a
piece of dark chocolate, or like a Snickers bar,
karate chopped off the side of a thing. Now, that was my first exposure to steel out in the real world. A relatively macho environment. We obviously didn't fix the gearbox because it was very much like
the Snickers bar, actually. So we had to borrow another gearbox from one of the other teams. After the seven days were over, I think we eventually got up
to about 278 miles an hour. But I believe that the
record of 313 still stands. So if anyone's interested, that record is there to be gotten. But that was my first exposure to steel, was this kind of macho environment. And when it came to thinking
about trying blacksmithing, the craft of steel
myself, I got very lucky. I was listening to "Women's
Hour" in the lab one day and I heard they were talking
about steel and I was like, "Turn that up. And I heard a woman called Agnes Jones who was talking about being a blacksmith, and you would've met Agnes earlier. I very embarrassingly fangirled her online and she very generously
came down to London. We chatted on my podcast, and
then when it came to the book, I went up to visit her in Glasgow and we had an amazing day
blacksmithing together. It was so much fun. I made a very wonky poker and a little hook to put in my camper van. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you a little bit of blacksmithing. You've seen things snap,
you've seen things get brittle and be ductile, and obviously
when we're doing blacksmithing what we're doing is we are
really trying to get into that ductile area, right? We really wanna get it as
soft as we possibly can because steel in itself is a
very hard and strong material. So. (blowtorch hissing and roaring) Right. So. Heat a bit of steel. Should we have some music for this? It's gonna take a couple of minutes. (upbeat live music) That's quite a short one, that one. (Anna chuckles) (live band playing "One More
Chance" by The Jackson 5) Amazing. That's actually perfect timing. So what I'm looking for here is the metal to get hot obviously. And blacksmith's, Agnes told me, know the temperature of their steel by the color that it glows. Because at around 500 degrees, materials like steel
will start to glow red. And then at around a 1,000 degrees or so, they'll start to glow orange. And the hotter you make them, the kind of further down
the rainbow they go. So they start at red and then orange. And if you've ever been to primary school, you'll know that they then turn yellow, and eventually the hottest
materials will turn blue. And the hottest, hottest materials will overshoot the visible spectrum and go into the infrared spectrum. And that's why we get sunburned is 'cause the sun is so hot that it exudes ultraviolet radiation as well. But this isn't as hot as the sun. This is probably around 1,000 degrees now. And around that 1,000 degrees steel will be easily soft enough for even a terrible
amateur blacksmith like me to make a small and tiny dent in it. So where's my hammer? There it is. (blowtorch roaring) Ah, it's still Snickers. It's gonna be smelly! (hammer thudding against steel) It's gone very slightly flatter, everyone. (audience chuckling) (audience applauding) Yeah, look, the day
that I spent with Agnes was obviously a lot more
impressive than this. Under her guidance, even my amateur hand made those beautiful objects. But the point really is that my... I don't know where to put this. Don't touch that, everyone. My first impression of steel is this kind of macho
engineering material. Doesn't have to be the case. Obviously you've seen Agnes's
artwork out there, right? It's beautiful, it's aesthetic,
it's curved, it's kind of... It's not the kind of macho
stuff that I had initially met. And when I wrote the story
of steel for my book, I sort of wrote the story of the women behind the steel industry. I was researching for it
and I went up to Sheffield, which is a massive steel
making town in England. And there's an, ironically,
bronze statue in- (audience laughing)
(Anna laughing) In Sheffield Town Center
called "Women of Steel." During the Second World War, the women of Sheffield went
into the steel factories to continue the work that men couldn't do 'cause they were on the front line. And after the war, they basically
just kind of got displaced by the men who came back and
then they had to kind of, all of those skills were lost. And so this statue in
Sheffield Town Center kind of shows you, kind of
commemorates their knowledge, their expertise, and their time working in the steel factories as well. So I think this kind of shows us, well, what I learned
from Steel certainly was, it's not just the materials
that are around us, it's the kind of stories
of the people that make it and that manufacture it and that have kind of
come before us as well. (playful live music) (musicians grunt humorously) (audience laughing)
(Anna chuckling) Let's talk about brass. I first met brass when I was in year six. And in our music lesson at
school, my music teacher said, "Oh, we're gonna have a demonstration from the school's new brass teacher." And I thought, "Here we go. Some loud old bloke blasting
our ears out with a trumpet." And no sooner had I had that thought, but the most glamorous person I've ever seen in my entire life walked through the door holding a trumpet. She gave us a 15, 20 minute demonstration of everything that a trumpet can do. And by the end of that
20 minutes I was like, "I wanna be exactly like you and I need you to teach me how, please." So from that day forth,
I picked up the trumpet and it was a material that I couldn't not write about in the book. 'Cause music has been
a huge part of my life, as you can see, for a
very, very long time. And one of the demonstrations
that Sarah Wilson, that was her name, that
this trumpet player did. Sorry, I'm just trying to find my demo. Here it is. It's absolutely fine, don't worry. - You want that one yet? - No, no, no, it's fine. Thank you. So the demonstration that Sarah did was, well, funnily enough, it actually kind of, it demonstrates that materials are not actually that important at all because you can make a
pretty convincing trumpet out of a hose pipe. So you can make a pretty
convincing trumpet out of a hose pipe. (Anna playing music from hose pipe) It is not that in tune, but... (audience applauding)
(jazzy tune plays) It gets a little bit better if you put the plastic funnel on the end. Sounds a bit more trumpety then. (out of tune music plays) (audience laughs) (audience cheering) (audience applauding) Yeah, so materials are not that important. You can make a pretty convincing
trumpet out of a hose pipe, but this hasn't got any buttons to press. But even with a hose pipe, you can make quite a few
different pitches of note. (Anna playing music through hose) That lower harmonic is really horrible. And the way that this works, right? I think it's really, really interesting, and I'm gonna show you how, and then I'm gonna demonstrate it for you in a little bit more of a dangerous way. But first, let's talk
about harmonics, right? 'Cause that's what you are hearing. You are hearing what are called harmonics. It's different ways for the air
to vibrate inside this tube. An easier way to understand
this is actually not with tubes, is with strings, because
you can kind of see them. So Raj, if I can invite
you please to come up. Thank you very much. Welcome, Raj! (audience cheering) Raj, what I'd like you to do
is just to play an open string. Okay. This is what we're
seeing up here, right? This open string is vibrating. As Raj plucks it, it's
vibrating up and down, and then that's transferring
into sound waves, which is what we are hearing. But on a string, you can play, you can make that string
vibrate in different ways, which are called harmonics. And Raj can do this by doubling
the frequency of the string, by encouraging the middle
part of it to not move, to kind of form what we
call a node, if you like. So Raj, if you can play
us the first harmonic. (gentle tone resonates) And then the open string. (deeper tone resonates) Right. So that's an octave between, right? So you're doubling the frequency by halving the length of
string that is vibrating. And there are loads of
harmonics that exist. You can do this with thirds
and quarters and fifths in lots of different ways. (Raj plucking his bass) Very nice. Thank you. (audience applauding) So these different ways of
vibrating create different notes. And it's these that the hose
pipe trumpet is tapping into. Now, the difference with a
pipe is that with a string, you've got the two ends of the string that are in a fixed position. With a pipe, the end that
your mouth is at is closed 'cause your face is on it, but the end with the funnel is open because there's a funnel. (audience chuckles) So with a pipe, it's different. With a pipe, you have
a closed bit at one end and open bit at the other. But the same thing applies. In the same way that Raj made his string vibrate in different ways,
in different harmonics, we can do the same thing
with the air inside the tube. The difference though is that because we are open at one end, some of those harmonics are not available to instruments like the trumpets. So we have only every other
harmonic available to us. And that's why there's
some quite big tonal gaps in the trumpets repertoire. Now, that's the kind of
information part of this. I'd now like to demonstrate this in a little bit more of a
dangerous way, using fire! Yay! I promised you propane. Right, I'd like to introduce you to my hand-built Rubens tube, which- (Anna yelps)
(audience gasps) Oh, you're carrying the propane as well. - [Crew Member] Not anymore. - Not anymore. (laughs) Propane's gone. Right, ready? Yeah. Right. This is my hand-built Rubens tube. I built this a few years ago by going to a plumber's
on Tottenham Court Road, asking them for a big long pipe, drilling loads of holes along the top, fitting a gas fitting to one end and a little rubber membrane at the other. What we're gonna do is we're
gonna fill this with propane. It's basically like a big, long gas hub. Ooh, that was quick. Is it anyone's birthday? (audience laughing) Gosh, that's very warm. Okay, lovely. Okay, so this is called a Rubens tube. Invented by Rubens, but not that one. And what this is is a pipe
that is the same length, well, 1.5 times the length
of a trumpet actually, and series of holes along the top, and through those holes are
little flames of propane. Now, what happens when
I play sound down here is that the rubber membrane
will transfer the sound from my trumpet into the propane and the propane will form
those sorts of standing waves that we saw in the instruments. And standing waves,
sound waves of all kinds are fluctuating areas of
high and low air pressure. But in the case in here,
it's fluctuating areas of high and low low propane pressure. And so when you have that, you have some flames that have
got a lot of propane pressure and some that have a small
amount of propane pressure, and what you see is sound waves in fire. So I'll give you a little demo. Let's just play some open harmonics. (Anna playing the trumpet) It was no one's birthday. (audience applauding) Okay. (audience applauding) So you can see, so the
same thing is happening that was happening on Raj's string, but it's happening in the propane in here. Should we play a tune? - [Audience] Yeah! - One, two, three, four. (band playing playful music) (audience applauding and cheering) So what's all this got to
do with material science? Well, we can... Let's keep this lit for a minute. We can understand sort
of how material science interfaces with society, with culture, through kind of the
history of the trumpet. Because the trumpet has evolved as metalogy has evolved
throughout history as well. So trumpets have been around, they were one of the
first instruments, right? Conch shells and didgeridoos, anything that you could
find in the natural world that you could blow down and make a sound constitutes an early trumpet. And by the sort of ancient
Egyptian kind of era trumpets as instruments,
mostly instruments of war like military instruments were used. That's 'cause they were loud, they had these distinct
harmonics that you could play, which you could convey signals with. And there are also
loads of cursed trumpets throughout history. This is the silver and gold trumpet out of Tutankhamen's tomb. What you can see, the top one there is the silver and gold trumpet, the bottom one is the kind of
thing that they put inside it so that if you dropped
it, then it didn't dent. Because silver and gold, although they were very,
very valuable materials befitting of a king, are not
good materials for trumpets because they're very, very soft. So you needed to have your
little trumpet inner in there every time that you weren't playing it. So silver and gold then, we can see, are metals that we were able
to dig out of the ground. They exist as themselves in nature, and silver and gold was
some of our first metals that humans kind of ever
really started to use. Then the bronze age came along. Around 5,000 years ago, we
started to invent new materials that hadn't existed in nature before. And we started making trumpets out of them very, very quickly. And so bronze was a
material that was an alloy. So we started mixing different
types of metals together to make them stronger
and sharper and tougher. And we made all sorts of kind of, I guess, weapons out of those, but also trumpets. And by this point, the
shape of it is the same. It's basically just a great big long tube. And so the only notes that you could play on a trumpet like this would be the same harmonics
that you've had before. (Anna plays a scale on the trumpet) So that's what you could do. And so really, it was just
kind of military stuff that people did. (Anna playing a military tune) That kind of stuff. For a very, very long time. By the Roman period, we had brass. And brass is what's called
a sonorous material. It kind of is very good at supporting the vibrations and sound. And we started to make
trumpets out of brass. Now, by this point, music
was moving on a little bit. And sort of organized music, the kind of classical
period was coming about, and so melodies were
starting to become important. And the problem with for trumpets though, sitting at the back of the orchestra, was that they still only
had those same few notes. And so you never got the tune! Which was really annoying, I imagine. I dunno, I wasn't there. (audience chuckles) But you never get the tune as
a trumpet back in those days. And so what they did
was they started to put little holes along the
length of the trumpet, a bit like how kind of
wooden instruments have in order to change the length of it. And then you could start
having, yeah, a bit more music that was actually musical. (Anna playing a tune on the trumpet) Et cetera, right? Melody, tunes, woo-hoo! When you start having holes in trumpets. Everything changed with
the development of, well, firstly being able to bend pipes. That was quite an instrumental- Ha-ha. Development in metalogy, but also being able to
do kind of finer details. So we're not just talking tubes now, we're actually talking sort of mechanisms. And this is a trumpet from
the sort of late 1700s and it was what was
called the keyed trumpet. And the keyed trumpet had
enough intricate mechanisms, we were able to metalogy
enough to be able to basically add all of the different notes that the keyboard has access
to, but now into a trumpet. And composers like Hyden and Hummel, they started writing trumpet concertos to celebrate this new technological feat. And I'll see if I can
remember how this one goes. (Anna playing gentle tune on the trumpet) Et cetera. So the trumpet had gone- Thank you.
(audience applauding) The trumpet could be lyrical,
the trumpet could have color, the trumpet could have the tune finally and be just as kind of expressive as all of the other violiny
people at that point. So trumpets and metalogy and engineering was all keeping pace with how
music was changing as well. And we get to the trumpet
that we have today as a result of the Industrial Revolution, because with the Industrial Revolution and with the invention
of the steam engine... The steam engine is just a load of valves. Steam engine had them first,
and someone had the bright idea of sticking valves onto a trumpet. That made the switching
of the notes really easy and it made the modern era of music accessible to trumpet players from the kind of romantic
period, the jazz period, and then to the funk and soul period. (audience cheers)
- Three, four! (jazzy live music) (audience applauding) Now, I need to move on. So, well the final point
that I will say basically is that materials engineering, they were inextricably
linked with kind of culture and how culture was changing and society, and we can see that all in kind of the engineering of trumpets. But the final thing that I
wanna say about trumpets, as we saw with our tube, the material of the trumpet
isn't actually that necessary, isn't that important. And one of the- Thanks, Dan. One of the silly ideas that I had for the wonderful demo team
at the Royal Institution was to say, "How important
are materials to trumpets? And shall we see what we
could make a trumpet out of?" So I can't take any
credit for this at all. This is all the wonderful demo team. There's a few world firsts
about to happen, guys. This is actually just a plastic trumpet. This isn't anything particularly special, but this was our starting point. So have a listen to this. (pitchy tune playing) (Anna laughs)
(audience chuckles) A very basic sort of trumpet. Okay. Like I say, I tasked the
wonderful Royal Institute team with how much we could push this idea that you can make a
trumpet out of anything. So allow me to introduce you to the world's first chocolate trumpet. (audience laughing) Now, the experiment is, does
it sound exactly like that one? So have a listen. (pitchy tune playing) (Anna laughs)
(audience chuckles) (audience applauding)
Sounds the same. Sounds exactly the same. (Anna laughs)
(audience chuckles) Oh, it's so silly. (Anna laughs) Concrete trumpet. (Anna laughing)
(audience laughing) Does it sound the same? (pitchy tune playing) (Anna laughing)
(audience applauding) Concrete sounds the same. (Anna laughing) Oh no. (Anna laughing) (audience chuckling) Jelly trumpet? Does it sound the same? (pitchy tune playing) (Anna laughing)
(audience chuckling) (audience cheering) (pitchy tune playing) It really smells delicious
when you play it as well. (audience laughs) And finally, I actually haven't
seen this one before 'cause, well, because it's been in the freezer. Ice trumpet. - [Audience Member] No! - Mm-hmm. (audience laughing) Ooh, it was quite slippery. (Anna laughing) Does it sound the same? That's actually very beautiful. Does it sound the same? (pitchy tune playing) (audience applauding)
(audience cheering) Dan, come and take a bow! Come and take a bow. (audience cheering) My goodness. Who'd have thought it. Right. Gonna skip that material. Final one. Material of sugar. In the summer of 2018, I found myself standing on a beach called
Shakespeare Beach near Dover with my arm up like this,
ready, just waiting. Slightly off the shore, about as far away as
the back row are there, was bobbing a little boat. And on that boat were my crew members that would be assisting
me as I attempted to swim the 21 mile span of water
from England to France. While I was standing there looking at this enormous
ocean in front of me, I was hoping that I'd
done enough training. I'd spent every weekend
that summer down in Dover, practicing, swimming for hours
and hours and hours on end. But I had one material on
my side in this endeavor, and that material was encased
in chocolate mini rolls, it was sloshing around in energy drinks, it was dissolved inside a
little gummy bears tummy. Because these sorts of
ridiculous endeavors require a lot of energy,
a lot of refueling. And so the material that I had on my side was the material of sugar. So as I was standing there on
Shakespeare Beach, waiting, I was thinking about all
the sugar that was on board and thinking, "I hope I've brought enough, and also my passport." And as I was thinking these thoughts, a siren went off on the boat and I knew that that was my
cue to wade into the water and to start putting one
arm in front of the other and attempt to swim to France. Now, let's have a little look at sugar. Sugar structured the
swim from start to end. One of the classic questions
that people often ask is, "Do you have to stop to
rest or to eat something?" Rest? No. Eat something? 100%,
definitely, all the time. So we stop about once every
hour in a channel swim to consume hopefully enough
energy to get us across. Now, sugar comes from plants from the process of photosynthesis. You may have learned this at school. But not all sugars are equal, as I learned in my extensive
research while I was training. Now, let's be material
scientists about this. Let's zoom in and have a look at what the atoms are up to inside sugar. This is a molecule of sucrose. Sucrose is the sort of
sugar that you would have in your kitchen cupboards at
home, pretty standard sugar. And what I want you to notice is the two, the shape of the molecule, right? There are two kind of rings
of atoms that are joined with an oxygen in the middle. This is a relatively small molecule, and we know this because
when we eat sugar, we get the energy out of
sugar really, really quickly. Our body is able to break
down that small molecule like, "Bam! Done it! Here's the energy!" Which is wonderful. It's really, really useful. I'm gonna reuse the trumpet demo to show you exactly how
accessible this energy is for us. So... More fire. Protect the floor this time. What I'm gonna show you is exactly how accessible
the energy of sugar is. So what I've got is just like
a very standard icing sugar that you can buy that you'll probably have in your kitchen cupboards at home, and I'm gonna put it
into the funnel trumpet. And I want you to watch
what happens when it burns. Oops. There's probably a
better way of doing this. Oops. Don't talk while you're gonna do that. Okay.
(audience laughing) You have to do the countdown. Okay, ready?
- Three- - Hang on, hang on, I'm not ready. Okay. - [Audience] Three, two, one. (audience cheering) Yes, thank you! Right.
(audience applauding) Sugar, like sucrose, lots and lots of available energy, right? It's really easy to burn, and that kind of is what
happens in our bodies as well. We can break it down really
quickly and access that energy. But you don't want to be
doing this in a channel swim, because in a channel swim
you might be swimming for 14, 16, 20, 26 hours at a time. You don't know how long
you're gonna go on for. And so you don't wanna have a really sharp sugary energy spike and be like, "Woo-hoo, I can swim for days!" And then like 10 minutes
later be like, "Ugh." And so what we wanna do is to
eat different types of sugars that will release their energy
over a bit of a longer time. The sugar of choice for channel swimmers is called maltodextrin. The molecule of it looks like this and it's a much, much bigger molecule. And you can tell that because
there's little brackets around the sugary ring,
there's an N there, and it says the N is greater
than two, but less than 20. So maltodextrin molecules have up to 20 of those sugary rings in a
great big, long molecule, and that means that it takes
a lot more time for our bodies to break down those molecules
and access that energy, which I'll now show you
again in the same experiment, but with a little pot of maltodextrin. So, same thing. Stick the glove on, empty
out the rest of the sugar. Okay. I want you to watch how
differently this burns. Okay, ready with the countdown? Thank you.
- Three, two, one. - Huh. Huh! An interesting scientific result. (audience chuckling) That's what I was expecting to happen. And I was expecting it to happen because this is a much,
much bigger molecule, right? So it takes a lot more for
this molecule to burn, right? Even a blowtorch can't burn it in this very scientific experiment. And that's kind of not exactly what's happening in our bodies,
but it's sort of similar. Our bodies take a lot more time and energy to break down these molecules. And so the energy
release that they give us happens over a much longer time period, which is great when you
are attempting to swim for hours and hours and hours on end. In my channel swim, I had maltodextrin as sort of dissolved in liquid and my crew would throw
it down to me every hour and I would drink it down
and then swim on every hour after every hour, after
every hour, after every hour. There's one more really cool thing that I wanna show you about sugar before I talk to you a little bit more about the swim itself, and that is to sort of
take us back to what I said at the start about what
material science is and how it can show us how the material world around us is made. This is, literally I
just got a microscope, got the sugar out of my kitchen cupboard and had a look at what it looked like, and so this is just loads
of little grains of sugar. But if I zoom in on one of
them, you can see something that I think is
unbelievably amazing, right? This little sugar crystal
looks like a gemstone, right? If I emphasize the corners of it for you, you can maybe see it a little bit better. This is a single crystal of sugar, and it's in this shape because
of the way that the atoms and the molecules are
arranged inside that material. So every single molecule in there has lined up exactly in the right place next to its neighbor, and millions of them have coordinated themselves and done that, and they've grown in a way that makes the shape of this crystal. So we can see from the
shape of this crystal what's going on inside the atoms and the molecules that make it up. And so when I see things like this, I see that we are kind of,
we can peek past the curtain of how the material world is made. This kind of demonstrates
to us, to me anyway, the kind of fascinating link between what we can't
see and what we can see. And material science has
really opened my eyes to exactly that, to how these
tiny, tiny building blocks of matter result in the
incredible material world that we've built ourselves. So I ate sugar every hour on the hour and I was counting down in my head until after about nine and a half hours when I would say that I ran out
of sugar, at least mentally, and had what is known in the industry as a sense of humor failure. Luckily though, at that point,
or shortly after that point, the sun came up and I found
myself swimming into the dawn in the middle of the English channel. And that sense of humor,
fortunately, was very short-lived. A few hours later I got the money shot. If you ever do swim the channel and you don't get this picture, you have to go and do it again. (audience laughing) (Anna laughing) And I will let you read the book to find out exactly what happened
at the end of that story. There are some for sale in the foyer. (audience chuckling) All right, let's, let's
play our last thing. (upbeat live music) Where can we end this? Well, I set out at the start of this story to become an expert in materials by chatting to craftspeople,
by trying to learn from them, learn their hand skills that have been passed
down over the generations. What I found was that the
more I learned from them, the less expert I became in a way because I realized that
the more knowledge base that there was that I didn't have. But that for me is kind of the joy of it and that is sort of what it feels like to be a scientist, actually. The more you learn, the more you realize quite how much there
is out there to master. But what I hope that you've
got out of this evening is by me showing you the stories, the stories of the ways that materials have intersected with my life, you'll start to notice
the way that materials have intersected with yours as well. Might not be trumpets, might not be sugar, but open your eyes to this because this is the stuff around us and this stuff really matters. It really does. We saw in our chapter about plastics how there are really huge problems that we have as a society
that involve materials and involve working together and solving these problems together and changing how we behave. So all of this stuff
is inextricably linked and I hope that tonight has given you a little bit of a glimpse into that. So I will end there. Thank you so much. I've been Anna Ploszajski. (audience applauding)
(audience cheering)
