He made a lot of mistakes, but the direction in which he made his mistakes was good, so he ended up getting the right answer. I tried to imitate him, but found it hard to make "good" mistakes.
INTERVIEWER GORO SHIMURA
Wen / Ba Jiu Ling
Imagine if the glass of the whole world were gone.
First of all, the glass is gone, you can use porcelain cups, metal cups, the problem is not big.
Then, the glass windows (including car windows) and glass walls are gone, and small pieces can be replaced by plexiglass, and large areas are not enough. Windproof and light transmission are difficult to combine, and things start to get worse.
Then, the glass mirror is gone, so I have to use acrylic mirrors (not wear-resistant), or hardcore, and use mirror polished steel plates instead.
Do you want to use your phone's front camera as a mirror? Sorry, the optical lens is gone, which means that the camera, glasses, telescope, microscope, and projector are gone. A small fraction of this can be replaced with cr-39 resin, but its use cases are limited.
Finally, the glass screen was gone, and the tens of billions of mobile phone screens, TV screens, and computer screens disappeared... We can switch to plastic films, such as old-fashioned mobile phones, kindles, and even the screen substrate of flexible screens in recent years is plastic, but the optical performance and hardness are not as good as glass, and the experience has declined significantly.
In fact, the glass family also has glass fiber, without it, many manufacturing industries will be a little troublesome.
In this way, glass is simply the light of civilization, and human beings cannot do without glass.
One artifact supports this. It is the treasure of the Hangzhou Museum and town hall, one of the 195 cultural relics in China that are forbidden to leave the country, named the Warring States Crystal Cup. What looks like a mediocre glass is actually carved and polished from a single piece of natural crystal.
Two thousand years ago in China, there was only one such wine glass.
But putting aside the value of cultural relics, such a transparent wine glass that consumes a lot of manpower and material resources and can only be used by a very small number of people can now be made of glass hundreds of millions, more translucent, more styles, and it is not painful to break. If there is inclusive finance and inclusive education, it is called the "inclusive cup".
Today we are not to praise glass, but to praise the fundamental support behind all walks of life - materials science.
The first major contribution of materials science is universal benefit, so that many ordinary raw materials (such as sand) have become high-tech things (such as LCD screens) and entered the homes of ordinary people.
The second major contribution of materials science is its original intention to improve performance. One of the most intuitive examples is the pole vault, where the world record has always been closely related to changes in the material of the pole.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the pole vault still used hardwood poles, the men's world record was more than 3 meters; then switched to bamboo poles, the world record exceeded 4 meters - this is the stage of using natural materials.
Could it be a little more powerful?
Bamboo poles are easy to break, some people switch to steel poles; steel rods are too heavy, aluminum alloy rods appeared in the 1950s, and the world record subsequently reached 4.8 meters - this is the stage of using metal materials.
Can you give a little more strength?
In the 1960s, fiberglass rods came out, lighter, tougher and more elastic, and world records began to climb wildly. Sergei Bubka of the former Soviet Union and Ukraine broke the indoor and outdoor pole vault records 35 times, setting a miracle of 6.15 meters - if the glass disappeared, even the pole vault would have to return to its original shape.
Can...... Give it a little more force?
In 2014, the men's indoor pole vault world record, which had been held for 21 years, was set again, because the players had a more powerful tool - carbon fiber rod, adding a layer of carbon fiber to the glass fiber.
On the women's pole vault side, Isinbayeva broke the world record 28 times, also because there was a "handy blade".
Of course, unlike pole vaulting, material innovation in most industries is quietly iterative. The planes we flew, although the model was always Boeing 7x7, Airbus A3x0, but under the same model, the aircraft has been evolving.
In the early years, the fuselage of the aircraft was heavily made of aluminum, which was strong, flexible and light. However, metals have a major disadvantage - it will fatigue, may suddenly break after multiple forces, and the problem is more serious at extreme temperatures, which brings great hidden dangers to flight.
So the two major aircraft companies began to use new materials, such as Boeing's carbon fiber reinforced titanium alloy tigr, Airbus glass fiber reinforced aluminum alloy glaze, etc., lighter (more fuel-efficient), stronger, more resistant to fatigue.
The original Airbus A380 had less than 5 percent composite material, and today it's 25 percent. The Airbus A350 xwb is made of more than 50 percent composite material, which is a quarter more fuel efficient than an aluminum aircraft of the same size.
China's c919 as a latecomer, composite materials accounted for 11.5%. Zhang Jun, deputy chief designer, said that the development of civil aircraft technology is divided into three aspects: one is the aero engine, the second is the main system of the aircraft, and the third is the material technology. It is not difficult to imagine that when the composite material technology goes up, the proportion of the whole machine application will be higher.
But ordinary consumers will only notice whether it is faster to fly from Shanghai to Shenzhen, as to whether the plane is stronger and more fuel-efficient, and even how many composite materials are used in the fuselage, they will not know.
They will only notice whether the speed of the mobile phone is faster, as to whether the mobile phone chip is 14nm or 7nm process, and even the key material of making the chip photoresist, they will not know.
Materials science has silently climbed through new peaks, created new records, and laid a good foundation for practical applications.
Record-breaking research is often not used.
In the field of materials science, laboratory innovation and commercial applications alternate. Sometimes the research results can not find the application scenario, or the production cost can not be reduced, so they can only lie in the laboratory and wait.
This brings us to Corning, an American glass and ceramic materials company that also provided glass covers for Edison's light bulbs.
In 1962, Corning developed a tempered glass called chemcor (potassium aluminosilicate glass), which is thinner and lighter than ordinary glass, but extremely strong, but also expensive.
Chemcor was developed as an automotive windshield, but there was no mandatory windshield safety standard at the time, and automakers were reluctant to use this expensive product.
The marketing department's search for other uses didn't materialize, and a few years later the project had to be shelved, investing $42 million, making it the "biggest and most expensive failure" in Corning's history.
It wasn't until 2005 that Jobs approached Corning to find a high-hardness, scratch-resistant glass screen for his new phone. Corning flipped out the long-discontinued chemcor, restarted the experiment, and launched the Gorilla Glass screen.
Today, Corning Gorilla Glass screens have been out of 6 generations, covering 5 billion electronic devices around the world. LCD screen glass has also become Corning's most profitable business.
The invention and application of materials is so full of cross-border and accidents, behind a happy success, there may be thousands of frustrating failures, and failures may contain success.
In 1969, a wire and cable company called Gore, the founder father and son began to study the insulation process of polytetrafluoroethylene (ptfe), a mistake operation, the heated ptfe stretched too much.
Father and son found that over-stretched ptfe repels liquid water but allows water vapor to pass through, in other words: waterproof and breathable. They named the material gore-tex.
Outdoor enthusiasts, seeing this name will most likely smile. This is currently the most famous waterproof fabric, not only for clothing, but also for medical, electronic and other fields.
Half a century later, Gore's annual revenue of $3 billion, nearly 10,000 employees, and still benefit from that classic mistake.
All of humanity has also benefited from that success and failure.
It has been nearly five years since Teacher Wu wrote "Go to Japan to Buy a Toilet Lid". In the past five years, both Chinese manufacturing and Chinese consumers have changed dramatically: we have carried out supply-side reforms, paying more and more attention to high-tech and environmental protection, while the new middle class has risen strongly, defining new aesthetic and consumer preferences.
At the year-end show a few days ago, Teacher Wu said when reviewing the toilet industry: Once, the compound annual growth rate of an industry was as high as 44%, what would happen? Countless companies will pour in, fight cost wars, scale wars, and fight the price red sea; and now, the industry has added 106 new Chinese-style innovations in four years, and hard technology has spawned a slow philosophy.
Material innovation and crossover are continuing, and the same thing, the user experience is upgrading. For more than 100 years, the toilets we have used are ceramic, and now Panasonic Bathroom has made smart toilets out of plexiglass, and launched the Elonor l150 series at the end of December.
From the supply side, the production efficiency of plexiglass is higher, the yield of ceramics is 60%-80%, while the yield of plexiglass is 99%; plexiglass is more environmentally friendly, and the pollution in the production process is smaller than that of ceramics; it can be thermally degraded after scrapping, while ceramics can only be buried after scrapping.
From the consumer side, the plexiglass material is not easy to attach scale, so it is more anti-fouling; at the same time, plexiglass has stronger plasticity than ceramics, which can make the toilet form in one piece, reduce gaps, clean more conveniently, and have more colors to choose from.
Material progress is like this, small-step iteration, not revolutionary, you and I inadvertently improve. We look back ten years later and find that our lives have taken on a new look. The same product, our requirements for it have changed from "can be used, what bicycle" to "can not give a little more power".
Countless beautiful products, including this different Panasonic bathroom Aleno l150 fully automatic cleaning toilet, is the answer.
The author of this article | Cats have medicine men | When the value is edited | Sesame sauce
Responsible Editor | He Mengfei | Editor-in-Chief | Zheng Yuanmei | Illustration | Nanke a guest