Six materials have shaped modern civilization

When it comes to examining the roots of the modern world, a new book takes an elemental approach.

Ed Conway’s “Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization” (Knopf) looks at the influence of the elements iron, copper and lithium — along with salt, oil and sand.

“Without them, normal life as we know it would disintegrate,” writes Conway.   

How so?

Sand is invaluable in the construction of the world’s buildings, bridges or roads. But it’s also vital to the production of glass and silicon chips.   

But even as the “most common” substance in the earth’s crust,” there’s never enough.

In China, sand smugglers have dredged so much from the Yangtze River bridges are on the verge of collapse and the local ecosystem threatened.   

Meanwhile, in India “sand mafias” control the massively profitable industry.

There is documented proof these criminal organizations have perpetrated “murders and kidnapping, brutal beatings” to collect and sell this seemingly ubiquitous material.   

But nothing reveals the importance of these materials more than oil. Its transformation into gasoline was integral to the story of the 20^th century.

Gasoline led to the car culture, but it also fueled the Allies’ victory in World War II. 

As General George Patton said to Dwight Eisenhower, “My men can eat their belts but my tanks have gotta’ have gas.” 

Adolf Hitler agreed, explaining that Germany needed to invade the Soviet Union in part to control its oil. 

“The life of the Axis depends on those oilfields,” he wrote to Mussolini. 

Japan spent the war trying to capture the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies.

Oil was so important that one reason Japanese military leaders used kamikaze pilots was because they only needed enough fuel to get to a target, not return from it. 

The Allies were less desperate for oil and gas because they had access to huge supplies in the U.S.  and Middle East.

The Axis did not. So limited was Germany’s gasoline supply that by 1945 its air force, the Luftwaffe, was “effectively grounded.”  

In his final days in a Berlin bunker, Hitler was making war plans for German divisions that had no gas at all, their trucks by then being pulled by oxen.