Materials & Engineering

What is the world made of?

Materials & Engineering

The supply chain, in samples.

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M·01Tensile 485 MPa

Steel · COR-TEN A

The container itself. Forty feet of weathering steel, hauled across oceans on a payload-to-mass ratio engineered to the gram.

M·02Density 991 kg/m³

Bunker Fuel · IFO 380

Heavy fuel oil — the residue at the bottom of the barrel — that pushes 90% of trade across water at $0.003 per ton-mile.

M·03f_ck 45 N/mm²

Reinforced Concrete · C45/55

Quay walls, terminal slabs, and the buried plinths beneath every gantry crane. The least-photographed material of trade.

M·048-bit ASCII over X.400

UNB+UNOA:1+EXPORTER+CARRIER+260513:1142+1'
UNH+1+IFTMIN:D:16B:UN'
BGM+610+BL10293+9'
TDT+20+0042S++1+++MAERSK SEALAND'
LOC+9+SGSIN'   LOC+11+NLRTM'
EQD+CN+MSCU2901832+45G1+++5'
CNT+7:24380:KGM'
UNT+7+1' UNZ+1+1'

EDI · UN/EDIFACT D.16B

Forty-year-old text protocol still encoding the world's bills of lading. Brittle, beautiful, and almost entirely undocumented in public.

Coda

Materials are politics.
We just chose to publish them.