This is our fifth article from Issue 26, which arrived with print subscribers last week. In it, Charles C Mann explains how he learned to love porcelain. The piece begins with a kitchen equipment enthusiast's frustration after buying a pricey induction cooktop that lacked the smooth cooking surface above its burners. The surface had to be purchased separately from another company, and it could not be ordinary tempered glass. Instead, it was made from Dekton, a material costing about five times as much as tempered glass, which typically runs around $30 per square foot.
Dekton has two answers. The first is that it is an artificial material invented by the Spanish company Cosentino in 2013. It is heat-, pressure-, scratch-, shatter-, and stain-resistant, a high-tech substance that would have been almost impossible to make thirty years ago. The second answer is that Dekton is basically porcelain. Porcelain is one of humankind's oldest high technologies, with proto-porcelain created more than three thousand years ago, and it is also one of its newest. Porcelain is having a resurgence today, as high-tech ceramics play a key role in advances in materials science.
Materials science has quietly transformed the built environment, changing the walls around us in ways that are almost invisible. The drive to create new types of matter has long shaped human history. Porcelain's origins lie in potters in northern China who experimented with kaolin, a fine, chalk-colored clay. Subjecting this soft, white mud to extreme temperatures produced striking changes. Ordinary clay is made of countless microscopic crystals, and heating them in a kiln causes hydroxyl groups to break free and the crystals to reform into sturdy, interlocking needle-shaped structures.
Kaolin is rich in kaolinite, a mineral made of aluminum, silicon, oxygen, and hydrogen. When heated, kaolinite also loses its hydroxyls and reorganizes its structure, giving rise to the durable material that became porcelain.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing