Material conditions

“ They are simple and strong in construction, of high capacity with comparatively small consumption of power, and furnish a good, uniform product, the size of which ranges from fine powder to coarse granules, according to the screens used and the class of material treated. ”

“ The exposure of any body to such a heat as will dry and consolidate its parts without wasting them. Thus wood, pottery, and porcelain, are baked, as well as bread.
BALANCE. To conduct arts, manufactures, and mines, with judgment and success, recourse must be had, at almost every step, to a balance. Experience proves that all material bodies, existing upon the surface of the earth, are constantly solicited by a force which tends to bring them to its centre, and that they actually fall towards it when they are free to move. ”

“ Specifications must therefore be drawn with care to insure that the requirements can be met by satisfactory materials. But certain properties, such as specific gravity, may vary greatly among materials equally satisfactory for construction purposes. One should not be misled by apparent differences in the characteristics of materials, because these may simply be natural peculiarities which have no bearing on the usefulness of the material. ”

“ For ordinary experience shows us on all sides that the operative cause and the material cause are quite distinct: we invariably have on the one side clay, gold, and other material substances which form the material causes of pots, ornaments, and so on, and on the other hand, distinct from them, potters, goldsmiths, and so on, who act as operative causes. ”

“ Natural forces.—Such natural agencies for producing wealth are seen in the simple properties of material bodies, such as the metals or woods or grains or fruits or flowers possess. We secure these properties for our uses. Gravity, sound, heat, light, electricity, chemical affinity, crystallization, even life itself, are names for certain forms of energy in nature which men are using more or less to meet their wants. ”

“ In the constituents of the solid earth we have forms and conditions of matter of remarkable composition and complexity. The original materials of the ground, of the rocks, and of the mines, are found to be, in every case, fully saturated chemical compounds. ”

“ Nearly every manufacturer is aware by painful experience of the great and almost incessant variation that occurs in the quality and properties of the materials used in his trade, and the frequent risk of failure of his process. ”

“ The methods of producing varieties of the metal suitable to the requirements of the engineer, foundryman and mechanician are described so that the worker may learn the history of the material he is handling. ”

“ The mechanic is to organize the force of metals, wood, fire, earth, water, lightning, air, and thereby shape the material things necessary to human needs—to feed, clothe, house, and heal mankind; corn he must turn to bread, cotton and wool to cloth, the clay, the forest, the rock, to houses ”

“ With a view to human uses, the production of a soil fitted for agriculture, and the general dispersion of metals, more especially of that most important metal, iron, were almost essential conditions of the earth's habitability by civilized man. ”

“ The constituent materials shall be identified by volume, percentage in weight or its volumetric equivalent, material type, and source of generation which includes residential, commercial, industrial, governmental, or other materials. ”

“ It is evident that the chemical, and in many cases mechanical, character of a great number of the objects important in the material economy of human life, must be affected by the presence of so large an organic element in their substance, and it is equally obvious that all agricultural and all industrial operations tend to disturb the natural arrangements of this element, to increase or to diminish the special adaptation of every medium in which it lives to the particular orders of being inhabited by it. ”

“ Raw material may either form the principal substance of a product, or it may enter into its formation only as an accessory. An accessory may be, consumed by the instruments of labour, as coal under a boiler, oil by a wheel, hay by draft-horses, or it may be mixed with the raw material in order to produce some modification thereof, as chlorine into unbleached linen, coal with iron, dye-stuff with wool, or again, it may help to carry on the work itself, as in the case of the materials used for heating and lighting workshops. ”

“ Whilst at present vast amounts of materials and energy remain unutilized, nearly all those terrestrial substances and forces might probably be rendered of service to us if we possessed sufficient knowledge. ”

“ No fixed rule, it is stated, can be given for the guidance of the workman to enable him to determine the relative proportion of the material to the solvent, the time for conducting the operation, or the degree of temperature, on account of the varieties of the material, and the degree of vulcanization or conversion to which it has been subjected ”

“ When we have in this manner traced back all kinds of mineral bodies, to the first and most simple condition of their component Elements, we find these Elements to have been at all times regulated by the self-same system of fixed and universal laws, which still maintains the mechanism of the material world. ”

“ Where a very great deal of power is needed for the making of an article or material of comparatively small weight and bulk proportioned to its value—such for instance as calcium carbide or aluminium—the immediate vicinity of the source of natural power will offer superlative inducements. ”

“ The amount of transformation which natural substances undergo before being brought into the shape in which they are directly applied to human use, varies from this or a still less degree of alteration in the nature and appearance of the object, to a change so total that no trace is perceptible of the original shape and structure. There is little resemblance between a piece of a mineral substance found in the earth, and a plough, an axe, or a saw. ”

“ The idea of the material substance is a highly complex idea, comprising the notion of many independent properties, introduced to us through several of our senses: such as solidity, crystalline form, transparency, coldness, smoothness, whiteness, &c.; the quality of fusion by heat is only one among many of the ingredients composing the conception ”

“ So were the deposits of coal, iron, petroleum, and natural gas, which humanity needed so long before it had sense enough to want them or to find them. So were chemistry and mechanics as rich fields, before they were cultivated, as now. ”

“ Every manufacturer is also aware that the difficulties encountered in manufactures are not limited to the substances employed, but extend to all the different processes and stages of processes through which these substances have to pass, and to all the forces, tools, machinery, and appliances employed in those processes ”

“ As we have seen, this is so that the requisite fundamental materials may be spent by each element in suitable proportions,—water, chemical compounds, air, and heat,—that organs may be added to organs, and that apparatus may be set to work in complex structures. ”

“ When we speak of manufactures of wood, of leather, or of iron, we refer to articles that have those substances especially for their component parts, and not to articles in which they have lost their form entirely, and have become the chemical ingredients of new forms. ”

“ Among the sixty-nine elementary or undecomposable substances which, variously combined, constitute the whole material of our planet, so far as we are acquainted with it, no fewer than fifty-six are metals. ”

“ Coal, iron, the metals, silver, gold, tin, lead, building stone, sand, clay, petroleum, and natural gas, and all geological products are essential materials of modern civilization, and a knowledge of them and of their modes and places of occurrence is one of the requisites of an education, either from the practical or the liberal point of view. ”

“ We have carried it forward, and a large proportion of the material used in the construction of our houses and furniture and bridges and cars are the product of our forests in a new and better and more enduring form—light [85] and capable of the most graceful fashioning. This is used in combination with the metals in all departments of our economies. ”

“ Mankind used up material—insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. ”

“ Elective affinities of organic elements are the forces by which the vital structures and varied forms of living things are produced; and the principles of connexion and equilibrium of these forces in the various parts of the organization prescribe limits and conditions to the variety and developement of such forms. ”

“ By the processes of art and manufacture, by the operation of those powers on which organisation and life depend, solid matter is constantly poured off in such a state that it cannot be detected, as matter, by any of the human senses. Yet a thousand results, daily and hourly accumulating as truths around us, prove that the solid metals, the gross earths, and the constituents of animal and vegetable life, all pass away invisible to us, and become “thin air.” ”

“ The material is presented, not as a finished subject, but as a growing one, with which the present generation of chemists is still busy, and which contains many important, unsolved problems of a fundamental character. ”

“ All the stone, coal, iron, copper, silver, gold, lead, and all other mineral substances, used either in building, machinery, or anything human ingenuity can make or invent—all belong to this earth. No matter how great the bulk or quantity, it does not influence this earth one particle. ”

“ When solid passes through solid, it is, surely, simpler to assume that it is done by a dematerialisation, and subsequent reassembly--a process which can, at least, be imagined by the human mind--than to invoke an explanation which itself needs to be explained. ”

“ But, if the knowledge of the chemical and physical properties of the bodies which surround us, as well as our imperfect acquaintance with the less tangible elements, light, electricity, and heat, which mysteriously modify or change their combinations, concur to convince us of the same fact ”

“ In the manufacture of iron and steel, the smelting of copper, the refining of nickel, the preparation and baking of porcelain, and in many other trades, innumerable difficulties, all having their origin in the properties of matter and forces, continually beset the manufacturers. In some cases difficulties occur which perplex both the workman and the scientific man called in to his aid, and so far from an unscientific workman being able to overcome them, even with the aid of the scientific man, he is unable to do so. ”

“ But you comprehend the result—man's complete triumph over disease by this process of dissolution aad rehabilitation. The foundation was my ancestor’s discovery that every substance—iron, gold, or any metal, flesh, bone, gristle, etc.,—may be dissolved by some chemical or combination of chemicals, and his inference was that a universal solvent might by their combination, be discovered. ”

“ Upon causing an adequate attractive force to act upon the molecules of metals they will be placed under conditions analogous to those to which they are submitted in strong presses or in the mills that serve for coining money. ”

“ Thus, to exemplify this reflection: the powers of aggregation and cohesion, which hold together the parts of solid bodies, as metals and stones, salts and ice,—which solidify matter, in short,—we can easily see, to be necessary, in order to the formation and preservation of solid terrestrial bodies. They are requisite, in order that man may have the firm earth to stand upon, and firm materials to use. But let us observe, what a wonderful and beautiful variety of phenomena grows out of this law, with no apparent bearing upon that which seems to us its main purpose. ”

“ Things act differently upon the senses if applied in small or large quantities, as filings of metal or horn, and separate grains of sand have a different color and touch from the same taken in the form of a solid. ”

“ My wish is rather to excite the industry of those who cultivate geology, to the investigation of the still recondite chemical actions, from which alone we can hope for the solution of these and numerous other difficulties which attend us. ”

“ I do not mean merely practical discoveries made empirically, but the chief part of this progress is attributable to the highest theoretical conceptions of the positive sciences. Thus all the modern industries of metals, stones, wood, work in materials of every sort, rest upon the general discoveries of chemistry and mechanics. ”

“ In the first place, the quantity of materials being always very great in metallurgy, requires corresponding adaptations of apparatus, and often produces peculiar phenomena; in the second place, the agents to be employed for treating great masses, must be selected with a view to economy, as well as to chemical action. In analytical chemistry, the main object being exactness of result, and purity of product, little attention is bestowed upon the value of the reagents, on account of the small quantity required for any particular process. ”

“ The laws which concern the intimate constitution of bodies, not as respects their structure or the manner in which their parts are put together, but as regards their materials or the ingredients of which those parts are composed, form the objects of chemistry. A solid body may be regarded as a fabric, more or less regularly and artificially constructed, in which the materials and the workmanship may be separately considered, and in which, though the latter be ruined and confounded by violence, the former remain unchanged in their nature, though differently arranged. ”

“ Solids are in every way contrasted to gases. Each solid substance has its own peculiar degree of density, hardness, compressibility, transparency, tenacity, elasticity, power of conducting heat and electricity, magnetic properties, capability of producing frictional electricity, and so forth. ”