The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  Figuring out exactly how to build those roads took some doing. The Bureau of Public Roads set up a testing center near Chicago where researchers experimented with different types and proportions of sand, gravel, cement, and other ingredients to figure out how much of a beating from heavily loaded trucks each paving mixture could stand up to and for how long. They built a series of looping test tracks composed of various asphalt and concrete mixes, and then set a company of soldiers to drive trucks over them—nineteen hours a day, every day for two years.49 The bureau used the data to set pavement design standards.50

  Those standards included specifications for the aggregate acceptable for use on interstates. Like soldiers called to the nation’s service, sand grains for the new highways had to meet physical requirements of size and strength. That forced sand and gravel companies to invest in more sophisticated sorting machines. Mining and sorting equipment became increasingly automated, producing ever more aggregate with ever fewer workers.

  Official construction of the new highways began in the summer of 1956. At first the program was very popular. But the giant highways cut sometimes painful swaths across America. Land was taken for the roads’ rights-of-way, forests were cut down, fields were paved over, neighborhoods were bulldozed. Whole sections of cities, suddenly isolated behind concrete barriers, withered.

  Disenchantment grew fast. Social scientist Lewis Mumford, one of the earliest and most prominent critics of the interstates, denounced “those vast spaghetti messes of roads and clover crossings and viaducts that provide excellent material for aerial photography but obliterate the towns they pass through.” He hated their impact on major cities, too, calling it “pyramid building with a vengeance: a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of a city.”51 Journalists published scathing exposés of graft and wasteful spending during construction. Citizens rose up in what came to be called “The Highway Revolt,” fighting back against plans to shove roads through their cities. They won their first victory in San Francisco in 1959, stopping plans to build a double-decker freeway that would have cut off the downtown from the waterfront. Other campaigns thwarted or forced plans to change in New York City, New Orleans, and other cities.52 Over time the highway builders responded, to a certain extent, introducing measures to reduce noise, minimize environmental damage, and preserve historic areas.53

  The interstate was finally officially completed in 1991, nearly twenty years behind schedule. It stretched 46,876 miles and cost nearly $130 billion.54 At the time, it was the biggest public works project in American history. A lattice made of billions of tons of sand and gravel now connected the United States to itself far more intimately than ever before.

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  The interstates have turned out to be a double-edged sword. It’s hard to think of any other project or development that has so profoundly transformed America as have freeways generally and the interstates specifically. The car was and remains the foremost avatar of modernity, and asphalt and concrete are its little-noticed helpmeets. Freeways have altered where we live, work, and shop, and how we get to the places where we do those things.

  Much of that has been to the good. Paved roads have enabled goods to reach distant markets, knitted regions together, and made it far easier to visit loved ones and distant places. They have also saved countless lives. One benefit modern freeways don’t get enough credit for is the dramatic extent by which they have reduced the number of road deaths. Thanks to their well-engineered banks, wide lanes, gentle curves, separation from automobiles coming the other way, and careful control of merging ones, interstates are far safer than the roads they replaced. In fact, according to the Federal Highway Administration, the interstate is the safest road system in the country, with a fatality rate of 0.8 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, a rate almost half the national average. Compare that to the rate in 1956, when the interstates were launched, which was 6.05.55

  (Of course, to get those results you also need things like safety belt laws and traffic lights. Otherwise, highways can quickly become charnel houses. Each year around the world, nearly 1.3 million people die and as many as 50 million more are injured in car crashes. More than 90 percent of those deaths happen in less-developed countries,56 where traffic lights are rare, seat belts are little used, and the simple act of crossing the street often requires a pulse-pounding sprint through traffic.)

  At the same time that freeways have brought these benefits, though, they have also hollowed out cities, killed off countless small towns, wreaked environmental havoc, and spawned a car-dependent culture based on sprawling suburbs and soulless shopping malls.

  In the course of the construction of the interstates, urban neighborhoods, especially ones full of African American, Hispanic, and low-income residents, were cut through, paved over, or isolated and left to stagnate. “Planners and residents alike found that new highways . . . could transform a once vibrant neighborhood into a cold, alien landscape,” writes Lewis.57 “White flight” took hold as those who could afford to moved out of cities to commuter suburbs made accessible by the new freeways. The loss of all those affluent residents gutted the tax base of many cities, undermining public schools and other services. Downtown shopping districts emptied out as customers flocked to malls built close to highway off-ramps.

  Small towns got hit, too. Those that had grown up alongside railroads or rural routes but were bypassed by the interstates withered. The railroads lost out as well, both in the freight and passenger businesses. Today, trucks carry 70 percent of all US freight, seven times more than trains.58 By 1986, America’s interstates, though they made up only 1 percent of the nation’s freeways, carried 20 percent of its truck traffic. Manufacturing jobs also followed the freeways. Companies abandoned cities to build their factories on cheaper land in rural areas easily reached by the new roads.

  Roads built of sand opened up whole new tracts of the country for suburban settlement. Buildings made with sand made it possible for people to live in those areas. You no longer needed a nearby source of trees or clay to build with; you just needed an open piece of land and a road that concrete trucks could drive in on. The number of Americans living in suburbs mushroomed from 30 million in 1950 to 120 million in 1990.59 The numbers have kept climbing ever since.

  In many ways, suburbs are great. They provide millions of people with relatively quiet, safe, affordable homes, often endowed with swaths of private outdoor space their tenement-dwelling grandparents could only dream of.

  In others, they’re terrible. Suburbs devour land and make people dependent on cars, the source of so much pollution and greenhouse gases. The average driver now puts 14,000 miles on his or her car each year—a 40 percent increase just since 1980.60 That burns up around 172 billion gallons of gasoline per year,61 almost double the amount in 1970.

  Whatever else you can say about suburbs, their low density and dependence on cars make them an especially sand-intensive form of settlement. Think of all the sand that goes into those wide roads and all those low-slung, spread-out houses, each with its own driveway. Every one of those houses contains hundreds of tons of sand and gravel, from its asphalt driveway to its concrete foundation to its stuccoed walls to the grains on its roof shingles.

  The open spaces of suburbia also made possible an explosive proliferation of swimming pools, which require large amounts of sand in the form of concrete. (Pools also generally use sand filters to keep the water clean.) In 1957, there were only about 4,000 private swimming pools in the United States. By the next year, the number had shot to 200,000.62 It’s now more than 8 million.63

  American sand and gravel production grew in step with the spread of suburbs. It had been increasing steadily since the beginning of the century, but after World War II, it abruptly skyrocketed.64 Today the annual US total hovers around a billion tons, the vast bulk of which is used domestically.

  Ironically, while the growth
of suburbs meant big business for sand and gravel producers, it also created some significant headaches for them, as their quarries were rapidly surrounded by new housing developments full of people who didn’t appreciate all their noise and dust and started lobbying against further mining. In the late 1950s, for the first time, the National Stone, Sand, and Gravel Association set up a public relations team to “meet the challenge threatening the existence of many producers,” as the trade magazine Rock Products65 put it.

  One unexpected side effect of laying down all those sand and gravel roads across the nation was the proliferation of interchangeable, deliberately monotonous chain stores, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations that sprouted up in self-contained clusters near the interstates’ off-ramps. These chains explicitly aimed to provide an experience as predictable, safe, and easily accessed as the highways themselves, those great rivers of pavement that carried customers to their doors. It was no accident that one of the advertising slogans for Holiday Inn, a chain that found success by building hundreds of motels near freeways and interstates, was “Holiday Inn. The best surprise is no surprise.”

  In this way, freeways have helped to rob many places of their personalities, smothering regional character under a blanket of sand and gravel. The interstates are designed to be monotonous, engineered to the same standards, governed by the same speed limits, with signs in identical colors and fonts indicating the distance to the next city. As a result they induce highway hypnosis, providing an experience less like motoring than like sitting on a vast concrete conveyor belt, cruise-controlling along with no effort required beyond keeping one eye on the road and another on your gas gauge, for mile after mile after mile. That numbing sameness reduces the landscape to a blur interrupted at regular intervals by overbright outposts of gas stations and fast-food chains, replicated in slightly different configurations right across the entire country, so that you can have breakfast at a Denny’s in the morning in Nashville and dinner at what appears to be exactly the same Denny’s that evening in Minneapolis. The interstates connect towns and cities but are disconnected utterly from them and the land they pass through.

  Along with the exit-ramp convenience colonies, highways also fueled the growth of shopping malls. The first enclosed, climate-controlled mall opened in 1947 in Minnesota, and in short order such places became a fixture of American life from coast to coast. Many of them could not exist without the highways that bring them customers from far and wide. More concrete begetting the use of more concrete, more sand begetting the use of more sand.

  Today, 2.7 million miles of paved roads crisscross the United States, traversed by 256 million motor vehicles that cumulatively travel nearly 3 trillion66 miles every year. The interstates make up just 1 percent of those roads, but they carry one-quarter of all highway traffic. The United States is not building new highways at nearly the pace of previous decades, but still adds over 30,000 lane-miles of highway per year. Counting the road base as well as the concrete and asphalt on top, each of those lane-miles requires an average of 38,000 tons of aggregate.

  The demand for more roads isn’t likely to slacken any time soon. Traffic keeps getting worse. According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, in 2015, delays due to congestion kept drivers stuck in their cars for nearly 7 billion extra hours, wasting over 3 billion gallons of fuel.67 That works out to 42 hours annually per commuter, double the figure in 1982.

  This car-centered, highway-enabled, sand-intensive way of living is the model much of the rest of the world is now trying to emulate. All those millions of increasingly affluent Vietnamese, Brazilians, Indians, and above all, Chinese want their own cars and the lifestyle with which they’re associated.

  In almost every country on earth, the number of motor vehicles in use is increasing. There are at least 1.2 billion already on the move, and that number is projected to more than double by 2050. Mexico City is currently adding two cars for every new resident each year; India is adding three.

  All those vehicles need pavement, and they’re getting it. Between 2000 and 2013, the world added 7.4 million68 miles of paved roads; that’s more than triple the total in the United States. Plans are in the works in Africa to build the first-ever highway stretching from Cape Town, South Africa, to Cairo, Egypt, and another that will wend its way across the Sahara. China is once again in a league of its own. In the last decade alone, China has built 1.3 million miles of paved road, tripling its network. It is now the world’s leading asphalt consumer. The Chinese expressway system is now longer than the US interstate system, and in some places makes it look downright puny. There’s a stretch of highway linking Beijing with Hong Kong that is a full 50 lanes wide. The International Energy Agency69 estimates that by 2050, the world will add more than 15 million miles of paved roads. Some 30,000 square miles of new parking spaces—also made with sand and gravel—are also in the pipeline.

  The use of sand in the form of concrete and asphalt has completely transformed where we live and work and how we move around. It has given us the power to conquer geography and overcome the elements. Almost at the same time as these changes began to take hold, the use of sand in another form—glass—began to change our lives in equally radical ways.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Thing That Lets Us See Everything

  Deep below the earth, in a cavernous West Virginia mine one day in 1868, a miner slammed his pick so hard into a tunnel wall that a chunk of coal flew out and smashed into the right eye of one Michael Owens, knocking him unconscious. It was hardly an unusual sort of accident, but nonetheless, Owens’s mother was very upset. After all, he was only nine years old.

  It took some time for the boy to recover, and once he had, his mother insisted he not return to such a dangerous environment. Which didn’t mean going to school, of course. Owens was the third of seven children in a poor immigrant family. His parents had fled Ireland to escape the potato famine and the oppressive British in the early 1840s, settling in West Virginia. It was a tough place to make a living, and it was perfectly common for boys to work in the coal mines alongside their fathers to earn extra money.

  The northern part of West Virginia is also rich in another less famous mineral. The loosely consolidated grains of the Oriskany sandstone, a hundred-foot-thick formation laid down more than 300 million years ago, are some of the purest quartz sands in the United States. Miners started digging them out in earnest after the Civil War,1 fueling the growth of a glass industry in the town of Wheeling, where the Owens family lived. Like coal mining and many other industries at the time, glassmakers welcomed child laborers. And so it was that Michael Owens went to work in a glass factory.2

  Truth to tell, it wasn’t much of an improvement, safety-wise. Glass is mainly made of melted quartz sand. Melting those durable grains requires tremendous heat, which in Owens’s day was provided by coal. Owens’s first job at the factory, at age ten, was as a blower’s dog, stoking coal into the glory hole of a furnace. Every day, black dust and ash covered his body and filled his lungs. Wearing knee pants held up with suspenders, he worked six days a week, ten hours a day, starting at five A.M. The temperature inside the factory sometimes topped 100 degrees. He was paid thirty cents a day. “The constant facing of the glare of the furnaces, and the red-hot bottle causes injury to the sight,” reported a visitor to a glass factory of the time, noted Quentin Skrabec Jr. in his book Michael Owens and the Glass Industry. “Minor accidents from burning are numerous.”3 The glass factories employed boys as young as seven. Adult glassblowers4 screamed at and beat them. A magazine journalist at the time called it “a boy-destroying trade.”

  But in Owens’s case, at least, it was a career path that paid off. The dirt-poor child laborer would grow up to revolutionize the glass industry, and in the process profoundly change American life. His contributions to his chosen trade were many, but the first one of truly historic significance came in the form of something small enough to hold in your hand. It spawne
d an industry that today rakes in more than $5 billion a year in the United States alone. And almost by accident, it helped to end child labor in the glass industry. All because an immigrant family happened to settle near a deposit of high-quality sand.

  Next to concrete, glass is undoubtedly the application of sand that has most profoundly shaped the modern world. Today, glass is so commonplace that most of us never even think about it—but we should, because it’s flat-out astonishing.

  Glass is in the buildings we work and live in, the windows we peer out of, the lightbulbs we turn on, the vessels we drink from, the televisions we stare at, the watches we glance at, and the cell phones we can’t put down. It is an almost magical substance. It can be shaped and molded into almost any form, from twenty-ton slabs to strands thinner than a human hair, from delicate crystal to bulletproof shields. It makes fiber-optic cables and beer bottles, microscope lenses and fiberglass kayaks, the skins of skyscrapers and the teeny camera lenses on your cell phone.

  Glass is the thing that lets us see everything. Without it, we’d have no photographs, films, or television, “no understanding of the world of bacteria and viruses, no antibiotics and no revolution in molecular biology from the discovery of DNA,” write historians Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin in The Glass Bathyscape. “We might not even be able to prove that the earth goes round the sun.” Even our view of our own bodies would be radically different: glass is the ingredient that makes cheap and abundant mirrors possible.