Billion-ton-per-year materials club

One of the things I was going to discuss today is this little plot. This is pounds per year of a material versus dollars per pound selling price, on a very large-scale log plot. Over here you have diamond, which is very expensive but they only produced 10,000 pounds. This is from a 1962 internal General Electric report done by a guy named Jack Westbrook, who's a graduate of MIT Materials. Jack just passed away a couple years ago. On this plot you can see that the most widely used material is stone, and then cement and steel. They don't have wood on this one. Well, they do have wood. The four largest usage of materials, the highest volume, are stone, cement, wood, and steel.