Burt Westwood 1960 GE structural-materials cost-volume plot

Now, this is a plot I've redone, but here's the original — from a proprietary 1960 General Electric report by a graduate of this department, Burt Westwood, who looked at pounds per year versus dollars per pound of structural materials. Stone is way up here, the most widely used. Cement back in 1960 was the most widely used. Carbon steel was actually ahead of cement; it's no longer. Wood. Those are what I call the billion-ton-per-year club. They weren't quite a billion tons fifty years ago, but they are now. And you go all the way down here and you get diamond, which is a structural material. We don't use it in large size, but it's a structural material because we use it for grinding and cutting — its mechanical properties, hardness and wear resistance.