by Vince Beiser
13. “The Thames Tunnel,” Brunel Museum, http://www.brunel-museum.org.uk/history/the-thames-tunnel/.
14. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013), 28.
15. Courland, Concrete Planet, 2755.
16. “Cement Statistical Compendium,” US Geological Survey, https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cement/stat/.
17. Courland, Concrete Planet, 3005–3008.
18. Miodownik, Stuff Matters, 61.
19. Courland, Concrete Planet, 3112, and Miodownik, Stuff Matters, 60–61.
20. Miodownik, Stuff Matters, 61.
21. Sara Wermiel, “California Concrete, 1876–1906: Jackson, Percy, and the Beginnings of Reinforced Concrete Construction in the United States,” Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Construction History, May 2009.
22. Ernest Ransome and Alexis Saurbrey, Reinforced Concrete Buildings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1912), 1.
23. Bay Area Census, http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty40.htm.
24. Courland, Concrete Planet, 3190.
25. “A Boom in the Artificial Stone Trade,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 1885.
26. Wermiel, “California Concrete,” 2–4.
27. Ransome and Saurbrey, Reinforced Concrete Buildings, 3.
28. Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (Boston: MIT Press, 1989), 2.
29. Ransome and Saurbrey, Reinforced Concrete Buildings, 163–64.
30. Wermiel, “California Concrete,” 7.
31. “Would Prohibit Concrete Buildings,” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1905.
32. The Brickbuilder 15, no. 5 (May 1906).
33. Bekins Company History, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/bekins-company-history/.
34. Courland, Concrete Planet, 4522–524.
35. Ibid., 4433–440.
36. Ibid., 4432–433, 4475, 4504–518, 4547, 4556.
37. Wm. Hom Hall, “Some Lessons of the Earthquake and Fire,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 1, 1906.
38. “Blow Aimed at Concrete,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1906.
39. “Building May Be Retarded,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1907.
40. “The Cement Age,” Healdsburg Tribune, February 28, 1907.
41. Wermiel, “California Concrete,” 7.
42. C. C. Carlton, “Edison Tells How a House Can Be ‘Cast,’” San Francisco Call, December 23, 1906.
43. Courland, Concrete Planet, 3447–449.
44. “The Advantages and Limitations of Reinforced Concrete,” Scientific American, May 12, 1906, 383.
45. Amy E. Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 19.
46. “Conquest of Mixture Soon to Be Complete,” Los Angeles Herald, November 15, 1908.
47. Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), Kindle Location 1064.
48. “Sand and Gravel (Construction) Statistics,” US Geological Survey, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/historical-statistics/ds140-sandc.pdf.
49. “Nassau County Growth,” New York Times, June 23, 1912.
50. Sidney Redner, “Distribution of Populations,” http://physics.bu.edu/~redner/projects/population/cities/chicago.html.
51. Joan Cook, “Henry Crown, Industrialist, Dies,” New York Times, August 16, 1990.
52. Edwin A. R. Trout, “The German Committee for Reinforced Concrete, 1907–1945,” Construction History, 2014. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43856074?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.
53. L. W.-C. Lai, K. W. Chau, and F. T. Lorne, “The Rise and Fall of the Sand Monopoly in Colonial Hong Kong,” Ecological Economics 128 (2016): 106–116.
54. “Hoover Dam Aggregate Classification Plant,” Historic American Engineering Record, July 2009, 13.
55. “Hoover Dam Aggregate Classification Plant,” 8.
56. Courland, Concrete Planet, 3511–512.
57. Megan Chusid, “How One Simple Material Shaped Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim,” https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/how-one-simple-material-shaped-frank-lloyd-wrights-guggenheim.
Chapter 3: Paved with Good Intentions
1. Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (Doubleday, 1967), 155.
2. Christopher Klein, “The Epic Road Trip That Inspired the Interstate Highway System,” History, history.com/news/the-epic-road-trip-that-inspired-the-interstate-highway-system.
3. Eisenhower, At Ease, 157.
4. “Highways History, Part 1,” Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century, National Academy of Engineering, http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3790.
5. Henry Petroski, The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 43.
6. Eisenhower, At Ease, 158.
7. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Eisenhower’s Army Convoy Notes 11-3-1919”; https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/convoy.cfm.
8. Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighway (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Kindle Location 1006.
9. Eisenhower, At Ease, 167.
10. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013), 54.
11. “Materials in Use in U.S. Interstate Highways,” US Geological Survey, October 2006.
12. Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 2.
13. Rickie Longfellow, “Back in Time: Building Roads,” Highway History, Federal Highway Administration, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/back0506.cfm.
14. Petroski, The Road Taken, 3–4.
15. “Learn About Asphalt,” BeyondRoads.com, Asphalt Education Partnership, http://www.beyondroads.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=page&filename=history.html.
16. Peter Mikhailenko, “Valorization of By-products and Products from Agro-Industry for the Development of Release and Rejuvenating Agents for Bituminous Materials,” unpublished doctoral thesis, Université de Toulouse, 2015, 13.
17. Carole Simm, “The History of the Pitch Lake in Trinidad,” USA Today, http://traveltips.usatoday.com/history-pitch-lake-trinidad-58120.html.
18. Maxwell Gordon Lay, “Roads and Highways,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/technology/road.
19. Bill Davenport, Gerald Voigt, and Peter Deem, “Concrete Legacy: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Concrete Pavement Association,” American Concrete Pavement Association, 2014, 11.
20. “How flat can a highway be?” Portland Cement Association, 1959.
21. “The United States has about 2.2 million miles of paved roads . . .” Asphalt Pavement Alliance, http://www.asphaltroads.org/why-asphalt/economics/.
22. “World Asphalt (Bitumen),” Freedonia Group, November 2015.
23. Swift, The Big Roads, 457.
24. Lewis, Divided Highways, 719–21.
25. “Highways,” Portland Cement Association, http://www.cement.org/concrete-basics/paving/concrete-paving-types/highways.
26. Swift, The Big Roads, 197–203.
27. Ibid., 247–53.
28. Lewis, Divided Highways, 1042–44.
29. Davenport, et al., “Concrete Legacy,” 13.
30. Lewis, Divided Highways, 339–49, 532.
31. “Land Reclamation and Highway Development Must Go Together,” Water & Sewage Works, Vol. 55 (Scranton Publishing Company, 1918).
32. J. D. Pierce, “Sand and Gravel in Illinois,” The National
Sand and Gravel Bulletin, 1921, 29.
33. Davenport, et al., “Concrete Legacy,” 17.
34. “Roads,” Encyclopedia.com, http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Roads.aspx
35. Lewis, Divided Highways, 971–73.
36. Kurt Snibbe, “Back in the Day: Road Camp Prisoners Built Roads,” The Press-Enterprise, January 18, 2013, and “History of the North Carolina Correction System,” North Carolina Department of Public Safety, http://www.doc.state.nc.us/admin/page1.htm.
37. Mark S. Foster, Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 5, 7.
38. Wes Starratt, “Sand Castles,” San Francisco Bay Crossings, June 2002; http://www.baycrossings.com/dispnews.php?id=1083.
39. Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, 10.
40. Albert P. Heiner, Henry J. Kaiser: Western Colossus (Halo Books, 1991), 6–7.
41. “Six Million Dollar Arroyo Parkway Opened,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 1940; and “A Look at the History of the Federal Highway Administration,” Federal Highway Administration, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/byday/fhbd1230.htm.
42. David Irving, Hitler’s War (London: Focal Point Publications, 2001), 769; http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books_added2009-2/HW1.pdf.
43. Eisenhower, At Ease, 166–7.
44. Lewis and Swift each discuss the history of the campaign for a national highway system in considerable depth.
45. Richard F. Weingroff, “The Year of the Interstate,” Public Roads, January–February 2006.
46. “The Size of the Job,” Highway History, Federal Highway Administration, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/50size.cfm.
47. Wallace W. Key, Annie Laurie Mattila, “Sand and Gravel,” Minerals Yearbook 1958, US Bureau of Mines.
48. Author interviews and “Rogers Group at 100,” Aggregates Manager, November 1, 2008.
49. Swift, The Big Roads, 3002.
50. Lewis, Divided Highways, 2532.
51. Swift, The Big Roads, 3663.
52. “The Interstate Highway System—Facts & Summary,” History.com, http://www.history.com/topics/interstate-highway-system.
53. Weingroff, “The Year of the Interstate.”
54. “Interstate Frequently Asked Questions,” Federal Highway Administration, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.cfm.
55. Ibid., and Swift, The Big Roads, 3848.
56. “The United Nations and Road Safety,” United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/roadsafety/.
57. Lewis, Divided Highways, 115–120.
58. “Our Nation’s Highways 2011,” Federal Highway Administration, 25.
59. “Roads,” Encyclopedia.com, http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Roads.aspx.
60. “Our Nation’s Highways,” 36.
61. Ibid., 44.
62. Mark S. Kuhar and Josephine Smith, “Rock Through the Ages: 1896–2016,” Rock Products, July 13, 2016; http://www.rockproducts.com/features/15590-rock-through-the-ages-1896-2016.html#.WAL4kJMrLdQ.
63. “U.S. Swimming Pool and Hot Tub Market 2015,” Association of Pool and Spa Professionals.
64. “Sand and Gravel (Construction) Statistics,” US Geological Survey, April 1, 2014.
65. “Rock Products 120th Anniversary,” Rock Products, December 22, 2015; www.rockproducts.com/blog/120th-anniversary/14999-rock-products-120th-anniversary-part-6.html.
66. “Our Nation’s Highways,” 4.
67. “Traffic Gridlock Sets New Records,” Texas A&M University press release, August 26, 2015.
68. “Global Land Transport Infrastructure Systems,” International Energy Agency, 2013, 12.
69. Ibid., 6.
Chapter 4: The Thing That Lets Us See Everything
1. John Douglas, “Glass Sand Mining,” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, August 7, 2012.
2. Quentin Skrabec Jr., Michael Owens and the Glass Industry (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2006), 66.
3. Ibid., 76–78.
4. Barbara L. Floyd, The Glass City: Toledo and the Industry That Built It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 49–50.
5. For a detailed explanation on the manufacture of different types of glass, see Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the World (Profile Books, 2011), Appendix 1.
6. Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 141.
7. Macfarlane and Martin, The Glass Bathyscaphe, Kindle Locations 148-156.
8. Skrabec, Owens, 21.
9. Miodownik, Stuff Matters, 144–147.
10. Michael Welland, Sand: The Never-Ending Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 248.
11. Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, v. 259 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), 182.
12. Macfarlane and Martin, The Glass Bathyscaphe, 1747–752.
13. Richard Dunn, The Telescope: A Short History, reprint ed. (New York: Conway, 2011), 22.
14. Ilardi, Renaissance Vision, 182.
15. Laura J. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 6.
16. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder, 104.
17. Welland, Sand, 16–17.
18. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder, 4.
19. Skrabec, Michael Owens, 49.
20. Welland, Sand, 248.
21. Floyd, The Glass City, 18–19.
22. Ibid., 1.
23. Skrabec, Michael Owens, 124.
24. Floyd, The Glass City, 28–29.
25. Skrabec, Michael Owens, 14–15.
26. Ibid., 14–15 and 88–89.
27. “The American Society of Mechanical Engineers Designates the Owens ‘AR’ Bottle Machine as an International Historic Engineering Landmark,” American Society of Mechanical Engineers, May 17, 1983; https://www.asme.org/about-asme/who-we-are/engineering-history/landmarks/86-owens-ar-bottle-machine.
28. Floyd, The Glass City, 48.
29. “Sand and Gravel (Industrial) Statistics,” US Geological Survey, 2016.
30. Kenneth Schoon, “Sand Mining in and around Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore,” National Parks Service, May 2015. https://www.nps.gov/rlc/greatlakes/sand-mining-in-indiana-dunes.htm.
31. “Vanishing Lake Michigan Sand Dunes: Threats from Mining,” Lake Michigan Federation, date unknown.
32. Schoon, “Sand Mining.”
33. “The Largest Glass Sand Plant in the Country,” Rock Products and Building Materials, April 7, 1914, 36.
34. Skrabec, Michael Owens, 80.
35. “History of Bottling,” Coca-Cola Company, http://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/history-of-bottling.
36. Floyd, The Glass City, 105.
37. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013), 92.
38. “World Flat Glass Market Report,” Freedonia Group, August 2016.
39. “About O-I,” Owens-Illinois, http://www.o-i.com/About-O-I/Company-Facts/.
40. “World Flat Glass Market Report,” Freedonia Group, August 2016.
Chapter 5: High Purity, High Tech
1. David Biddix and Chris Hollifield, Images of America: Spruce Pine (Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009), 9.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. John W. Schlanz, “High Pure and Ultra High Pure Quartz,” Industrial Minerals and Rocks, 7th ed. (Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration, March 5, 2006), 833–37.
4. Harris Prevost, “Spruce Pine Sand and the Nation’s Best Bunkers,” North Carolina’s High Country Magazine, July 2012.
5. David O. Woodbury, The Glass Giant of Palomar (New York: Dodd, Mea
d, 1970), 185.
6. Joel Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (New York: Macmillan Science, 2006), 171.
7. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013), 40.
8. For this summary of the extremely complex process of creating silicon, two excellent sources were Eric Williams’s “Global Production Chains and Sustainability: The case of high-purity silicon and its applications in IT and renewable energy,” a report published in 2000 by the United Nations University/Institute of Advanced Studies; and the Quartz Corporation’s website, including “Polysilicon Production,” http://www.thequartzcorp.com/en/blog/2014/04/28/polysilicon-production/61.
9. “Silicon,” Mineral Industry Surveys, December 2016, US Geological Survey, March 2017.
10. “Polysilicon pricing and the Chinese market,” Quartz Corp, June 14, 1016; http://www.thequartzcorp.com/en/blog/2016/06/14/polysilicon-pricing-and-the-chinese-solar-market/186.
11. “Crucibles,” Quartz Corp, http://www.thequartzcorp.com/en/applications/crucibles.html.
12. Jessica Roberts, “High purity quartz: under the spotlight,” Industrial Minerals, December 1, 2011.
13. Schlanz, “High Pure and Ultra High Pure Quartz,” 1–2.
14. Reiner Haus, Sebastian Prinz, and Christoph Priess, “Assessment of High Purity Quartz Resources,” Quartz: Deposits, Mineralogy and Analytics (Springer Geology, 2012), chapter 2.
15. Prevost, “Spruce Pine Sand and the Nation’s Best Bunkers.”
16. Affidavit of Thomas Gallo, PhD, Unimin Corporation v. Thomas Gallo and IMinerals USA, Mitchell County Superior Court, North Carolina, July 12, 2014.
17. “High purity quartz: a cut above,” Industrial Minerals, December 2013, 22.
18. “High Purity Quartz Crucibles: Part I,” Quartz Corp, November 28, 2016; http://www.thequartzcorp.com/en/blog/2016/11/28/high-purity-quartz-crucibles-part-i/218.
19. “How Microchips Are Made,” Science Channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2KcZGwntgg.
20. Smil, Making the Modern World, 74.
21. “From Sand to Circuits: How Intel Makes Chips,” Intel, date unknown.
22. “Semiconductor Manufacturing Process,” Quartz Corp, January 13, 2014; http://www.thequartzcorp.com/en/blog/2014/01/13/semiconductor-manufacturing-process/42.