Materials Research Activities

History of Materials Research: Driving forces

Driving forces

There are many driving forces in the history of materials research. Individuals have an impact, as does the development of enabling techniques, institutions, and the ever-changing discipplinary boundaries. These are addressed elsewhere on this site. Characteristic to materials science AND engineering is the fact that the demand side is important; so much so that the it has been suggested that the concepts of supply and demand are too embedded in an old way of thinking: The linear model of pure and applied science needed at least to be complimented with a causal arrow going the other way (demand in addition to supply) but it is now realized that the picture is really full of many feedback loops and so the notions of demand and supply are as obsolete as the notions of pure and applied. The following list illustrates our plans to include the driving forces in the history of materials research that used to be denoted under the heading of "demand":

  • funding
    • government funding agencies
    • corporate funding
    • corporate R&D agreements (CRADA)
    • small business innovative research (SBIR)
  • market "demand"
    • information technologies
    • transport
    • environment
    • energy
    • medicine
    • aerospace
    • security

The category of driving forces is intended to point us in the direction of the demand side to the history of materials research. The importance of end-user-needs has, if anything, gained in importance in the 1990s. Compare for example the following two characterizations of materials research from 1990 and 2000:

1990: materials scientists and engineers conceived of their discipline in the form of a tetrahedron, as shown on the left. 

Source: National Research Council, Materials Science and Engineering - Forging Stronger Links to Users, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999, 8

2000: materials scientists added a fifth corner to the polyhedron characterising their discipline: end users.

Source: National Research Council, Materials Science and Engineering - Forging Stronger Links to Users, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999, 10

The main reason that our studies from the user-perspectives are thin on the ground is that it is more difficult to find appropriate sources. It is comparatively easy to study departments of materials science and engineering or individual scientists' contributions. It is a little harder to focus on specific materials because the sources are distributed widely (prospecting, production, research). Demand is necessarily even more distributed; it is an aggregate gleaned from a market. If you have any suggestions on how to understand the history of demand for materials research, we would be most grateful.

We do, however, already have many indications of user demand in our pages already, such as those on solid-state battery research (the Stanley Whittingham pages are particularly apposite). Our pages on the scanning tunneling microscope (along with that on Calvin Quate) also aim to illuminate the history of demand for this instrument.

This page was written by Arne Hessenbruch and last updated on 19 December 2002.