Any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic, runs the third and most famous of Arthur C Clarke’s laws. On the face of last night’s evidence, then, Zoe Laughlin is not just a designer and materials engineer but a magician too.
Laughlin – as the presenter of The Secret Story of Stuff: Materials of the Modern Age (BBC Four) – blends bonhomie, excitement and expertise in perfect proportions, while shining a little light into the darkness of what is for most of us a profound ignorance about the new stuff that is being invented out there and the uses to which it can, will and is being put.
Part Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum (and why, incidentally, do we not have a programme based entirely on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum?), part Tomorrow’s World, part Proper Science documentary, its wonders left your mind boggled and the rest of you well and truly winded.
Did you know that you can make a spring out of nitinol (a nickel-titanium alloy), straighten it out, then heat it up a bit and watch it, well, spring instantly back into shape? Did you know that Nasa invented the lightest solid in the world – aerogel – in order to catch comet dust? Did you know that you can build up layer upon layer of powdered titanium into gently curving porous domes that look like they have been spun by futuristic spiders? And that you can then use those domes as the ball part of replacement hip joints? The bone will gradually grow into them until body and machine work in perfect harmony for so long that its last act will probably be a shuffle off this mortal coil.
If you do know all this already, don’t roll your eyes and sneer. Be glad! And tell me why you have been keeping this fascinating knowledge to yourself.
Laughlin took us around various sectors and industries to look at the latest innovations. Zirconia, ground down to nano-sized particles to make false teeth and crowns, has solved the problem of hydrothermal ageing – which is the problem of saliva working its way into the tiny cracks between grains of false teeth and breaking the whole lot down. And the new particles can be made into a paste thin enough to be squirted through the tiny nozzle of a 3D printer. In 20 minutes you, sir, can have a brand new bespoke molar that will last even longer than your powdered titanium spider hip. The future is so nearly here.
In the building industry, things are almost more thrilling because – get this – houses are being grown out of mushrooms! Seriously. Almost. It turns out that, if you’ve a mind to, you can throw a few appropriate nutrients into a mould and get mycelium (mushroom roots, basically – don’t write in, fungi fans, it’s good enough for our purposes here) to fill it. Some strains will even eat metal as they go. The result – as Laughlin proved with a blowtorch, a choc ice and a slab of the ’shroomy stuff in between – is a brilliant insulator and, one day soon, construction material.
Other people are busy developing leather and cotton alternatives out of banana leaves, materials that could revolutionise bulletproof clothing and vehicles, and the protection against bomb attacks in airports, schools, shopping centres and other public buildings. Oh, and pretty soon we’re going to be able to store the digitised entirety of human knowledge – down to the very last fuzzy snap of the very least favourite grandchild – on a few thousand tiny glass discs. Good times!
The Secret Story of Stuff would make a very good replacement for The Great British Bake Off. Like the beloved cake show, it has a salivatory quality. It is the kind of programme that fills you with sensations so rare as to be not instantly recognisable. There was eager anticipation of what the next twist or turn of human ingenuity and intellect would show. There was awe and there was wonder. There was – and this one had me baffled for quite a while – a sense of hope. A sense of human history as one of, overall, linear progression and a faint – oh, so very faint, but there – apprehension that the world may not be a raging bin fire resisting all attempts to put it out. It was, in short, good stuff.
