The Curious Engineer

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Material World

edconway.substack.com

Unexpected stories from the underbelly of the modern world. Click to read Material World, by Ed Conway, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Society / politics / economyHistoryScience

’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
76 from 15 Dec 2022 to 17 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (20 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 20

  1. A Conversation with V Anantha Nageswaran
  2. The Moneysavingexpert Economy
  3. The Diesel Weapon
  4. This isn’t just about Jaguar Land Rover (or VW)
  5. The little holes in your bread are telling you something
  6. Are We Approaching “Peak Ship”?
  7. The 30,000-mile fish finger
  8. The North Sea is not just about the North Sea
  9. The Radio, the Submarine and the Tariffs
  10. At least one very good reason to pre-order Trade World
  11. What Andy Burnham's £80 T-shirt really tells us
  12. The Most Important Trainer You've Never Heard Of
  13. The Factory We Had to Build Again
  14. The Apple-Banana Paradox
  15. The Missing Pipe
  16. Stuff Matters!
  17. How fracking changed the world
  18. Why I've been a bit quiet recently...
  19. Postscript to a postscript
  20. The End of Salt?

2025 10

  1. What can we learn from the latest Rare Earths crisis?
  2. A dying industry dies a bit more
  3. Tinned Soup and Tariffs
  4. The Strange, Unsettling Story of British Steel
  5. The Weird and Wonderful Logic of Aluminium
  6. Would FDR have done a minerals deal with Ukraine?
  7. America still needs Canadian oil. Here's why
  8. The Technological Revolution that could Supercharge the World's Batteries
  9. Forgotten Minerals #2: Caliche
  10. Time to talk about the Panama Canal

2024 15

  1. No, Kerosene did NOT save the Sperm Whale
  2. Hang on, are there ANY lost minerals?
  3. The Most Hopeful Chart in the World
  4. What's Happening at Spruce Pine...?
  5. The Sorry Story of Nicolas Leblanc
  6. Does it really matter if we can't produce "virgin steel" anymore?
  7. Lost Materials #1: Malachite
  8. The Unbearable Lightness of Productivity
  9. The Most Important Chart in the World
  10. The Race for Copper Hots Up
  11. How not to use your time as an energy superpower
  12. No, Elon Musk is not our Henry Ford
  13. The Original "White Gold"
  14. Latest from the Material World
  15. Further Reading

2023 30

  1. The Hump
  2. This isn’t just about fossil fuels. It’s about something MUCH bigger
  3. Nobody said this would be easy
  4. Globalisation is a far, far bigger deal than you think
  5. Jan Czochralski: the forgotten hero of the silicon age
  6. What the concrete crisis in UK schools teaches us about climate change
  7. Moving Beaches
  8. Why are we erasing our industrial history?
  9. Our planetary footprint is growing at an astounding rate
  10. Why does Britain export 80% of its oil?
  11. Salt Power
  12. Lights Out World
  13. Phosphogeddon Never
  14. The Glass Famine
  15. The Best Datapoint of All: Steel
  16. World of Glass
  17. It's Material World Week!
  18. The Eerie Story of Low Background Steel
  19. Beyond Gigafactories
  20. How Batteries Work
  21. Britain's headlong slide from silicon supremacy to silicon irrelevance
  22. Atoms for Copper
  23. The Race to Win the Industrial Revolution
  24. How Coal Helped Avert an Environmental Disaster
  25. The Salt Diaspora
  26. It’s the Energy, Stupid
  27. Why We Need More Maps
  28. Watching Paint Dry
  29. Yet Another Industrial Revolution
  30. Welcome to the Material World

2022 1

  1. Coming soon