REC_S2021_01

Student: I have a quick question for you. Um, in terms of, uh, on Tuesday or first day of class I have a conflict and so I wasn't able to stay for the entire intro. But um, I thought I'd remember hearing you said that you wanted a one-page write-up for each of the six modules we did. Um, but then on the slide I think that was posted it, you, uh, it says like approximately three pages for all six of the modules. So I was just wondering if you could clarify that requirement. Basically three pages total for the entire course?

I think I said a half page per module. Okay, so if you watch six hours of lectures in the module, and you write three lines as what the theme is for each single lecture, that'll make about a half a page. Got it. Okay, I multiply that by six and I get three pages total. I mean, I don't care if it's two pages or six pages. I don't want it to be 50 pages, you know. This is supposed to be something you can just jot down, you know, in, you might need to think about it for two minutes but jot down in 30 seconds after the lecture, okay.

And it's to teach yourself to stop every now and then and analyze things. And I'm actually asking you, frankly, for the rest of your life, about three or four times a day to stop and say what did I just accomplish, what am I trying to do, and take it back to a sound bite, okay, to help focus your efforts. Uh, half of what I always say, half of what we do we don't need to do. The problem is knowing which half, okay. What do we throw out? You'll never be able to accomplish all the things that you need to do, and I actually found this as a useful way to do things.

I also found, when I'm advising students um, or people kind of mid-career in their thirties or so, I often tell them I had to reinvent myself every three years in my career, my professional career. I had to say what did I accomplish over the last three years, where was I spending my time, what do I have to do over the next few years, and what am I going to get rid of from the past to be able to fit in the new things for the future. And I, like I said, I had to kind of reinvent. Even though I was still a professor, but what you do as an assistant professor has to be different than what you do as an associate without tenure, and that has to be different than associate with tenure, and that's different as full professor. You continually have to renew yourself, and you have to stop and think about these things. If you just go with the flow, you're going to end up in a cesspool, okay.

So anyway, that's that advice. Hopefully that answered your question. I was getting some nods. Okay, thank you. And that was actually one of the questions that got emailed to me. Uh, they wanted a little explanation about, uh, these six modules. Okay. Well, and be careful, it's not Don Baskin's [Baskin's]. To him a module is two or three lectures, and he's doing a double module on lightweighting which is twelve lectures. Uh, but he calls his group of six areas, topics that he's going to be covering, he calls those modules too. Well that's the problem with the English language, we don't have, we have too many words but we don't have enough words. I only did that, like I said, because the number of days that wasn't working out, I kept having to change things around. So by calling on a module I'm not linked to a single day of lecturing.

Steve: I understand. I just want to make sure the students understand your definition of module is different than mine, right Don?

Right. I didn't see you. Oh, I see you. I just see the initials there. Okay, I'm just hiding because I'm multitasking here. Okay. Um, someone wanted to know when you submit your, uh, three pages, that's at the end of the class. It was in my outline, there's a date and I'll remind you, but it's sometime the first week of May or something like that. Because that's when I figure some of you're going to finish watching 36 lectures, right.

Um, when will the student presentation be happening and how can we sign up for them? I will let you know, but right now, by next Friday, a week from today, you should have picked a topic. And I'm going to be asking you to email me your topic. So I'm going to get 30 or 40 emails over the next week, and I will write back and say this sounds good, or I will say no I think you ought to narrow it down to something like such and such, or I may ask you to give me a call so we can talk, okay. But I want to have some input into your selecting the module so it's doable in 10 minutes and stuff.

This, giving a presentation, is to help you teach some people about something that you're passionate about. And it should hopefully talk something about materials, at least in a broad sense, okay. But I'll let you know more towards April about turning in these things. But just start a Word document and start writing them down. And it's really more for you than it is for me, okay. Uh, but I do, I have to have something that grades each one of you individually. That's one of the institute policies. I can't give a whole class a grade, okay. I have to grade you individually on what you've done, and this is one of the assignments. And it's also one that I think teaches you to do some self-assessment on a daily basis, three-year basis. You've got to kind of look where you are every now and then and say where am I going, okay.

There is, uh, oh, this next one is more a bunch of questions, that individual questions from a student.

Student: Sir, I actually have a question.

Yes, go ahead.

Student: I have a few questions. Um, the first one is, if the list of modules you gave us has a specific, uh, reference to a module, to a date of a previous year, so basically referencing a YouTube video, does that mean that we can only see it through YouTube or it will also be done live during the class? For example, your modules are all going to be through video in YouTube, or will you be redoing some of the modules?

I won't be redoing them unless people ask for something. Like today, uh, if we don't fill it up with your questions I have something on why do I consider steel to be such a preeminent structural material, okay. That was a question from a student last year. So I basically pulled slides from my previous years' modules that I had, and made a little presentation which actually could go for two days, okay, uh, on steel and other — it's not just steel, it's other materials. Steve was talking about it, he's working with a company that, uh, is working on titanium. And so I'll tell you the economics of titanium and the scale of titanium compared to aluminum or steel or copper.

You can use whatever, you don't even have to just hit the modules. Although the modules, you, we had, we tried to put things in units of six, okay, because that's kind of what the students wanted. That's what edX wanted and stuff. Um, six hours of lectures. If you were to just take the 150 hours of lectures that are out there and just randomly pick 36 of them, not even in a coherent way, I would accept that. Because I think that there's actually content to be learned from each hour.

Student: Right, no, but I guess the question is, for example we know what Professor Lyons is teaching, we know what Don is teaching, but, um, we only, for example, at the last minute knew what Don was going to teach. So is there, if the list of modules just has a reference to a video, should we assume that it won't be done live and we should just watch the video, in case it's not done in lecture during the semester? That's kind of exciting.

Yes, I mean, there's no way you can cover ten years' worth of lectures in one course, which is why this course can be repeated. You should pick the things you're interested in. One student said she was interested in casting. I did one seven years ago on casting, she can watch all of those. Another student last year was interested in how we mechanically form and shape things, that's called deformation processing. I have one of those in these recitations. If you have questions on anything you're watching in any of these old videos, this is a chance to ask me, okay. Because, well, when else are you going to be able to ask me? I frankly put too many hours on there, okay. But it gives the student a lot of flexibility to study what they want.

Student: No, I think that's great. Okay, I just, yeah, just want to make sure that since there was no, um, agenda of what was going to be taught this semester live, um, just to be clear if I had to just go and watch the videos —

You're right. There's no agenda for me. I'm sounds good totally growing like an amoeba. Okay, I just, there's no organization. There was an organization each semester I actually lectured them, but there's no organization for you for topics from me. But you don't even have to take any topics from me. I mean, there's Simone Belmar [Belmar?] who did a module, and there's Neil Jenkins and there's Steve and there's Don, okay. So this is actually a pretty flexible course. Right, I told you it's flexibility in the stress-free environment.

One of the student's evaluations basically said they had learned more when they were free to just pursue what they wanted to pursue, rather than what they had to learn for the quiz, right? And I think that's true. That's part of, I hate quizzes. I, you know, when I was an undergraduate I used to not take courses if they had three-hour finals. That was a criteria that I used, okay. The only ones I took that had three-hour finals were the ones I was required to take, and I despised three-hour finals, okay. I still despise them, only now I hate them because I have to grade them, okay.

Steve: Anyway, Mr. Eager —

Yes.

Steve: I'm starting to interrupt. I've got a question. I'm getting a bunch of, um, emails here, um, from Zoom saying that all these people have joined my lecture, uh, and it has the Zoom number associated with my lecture. But um, some of those people, like Andrew and Shreya, you guys are on this meeting which has a different Zoom number.

Right. I don't know what happened, but I sent around a link for this. I think the email link was, the ink was incorrect.

Student: But I got a, like an Outlook notification or an event reminder, and that had this link. So that's what I used to join. Because when I joined that meeting I said I was the only one in it.

Yeah, okay. Well I'm recording this one, so if they want they can watch it. It's really for questions. So, I don't know, I don't want to take the time from all of you to go off, and you know, if someone misses a recitation, what's the big deal? You're not going to be quizzed on it, right. Uh, and if you really want it, you can watch it later. And by the way, the introductory lecture is on my website now. And I'm hoping, I think, I don't know if Don's is up there yet, and Steve will figure out what's going on with yours, but it hopefully will all be videotaped. Other questions?

Student: This is good. Yeah, I had another. Um, so there's three courses that I'm guessing overlap. So there's Material Processing, Material Processing in Practice, and Deformation Material Processing. So I'm wondering if you could tell the difference, I guess let me know what is in each so I can decide which one I want from all of those.

If you go to the website it actually gives you a little synopsis, a very brief synopsis of what's in each. Uh, but I believe, I'm, deformation processing is Tom Eager teaching out of Al Backofen [Backofen]. Backofen was the professor who taught me as a sophomore, and he was, uh, he was a world's expert in how do you shape and form metals, okay. Whether it's forging or drawing or extrusion or wire drawing, uh, how do you stamp car bodies, okay. And I used to teach his course 40 years ago. And then I taught it once as a module, and actually I, it's one of my favorite modules, because hey, I'm interested in the topic.

But it's everything that goes through the crystal structure, what we call the anisotropy, that allows you to do deeper draws of steel and aluminum to greater depths, like a beverage can is a very deep draw. It's actually called drawing and ironing, but it's a little bit different. But it goes through all those solid metal forming processes, okay. From the crystal structure through the forces involved in drawing, forging, wire drawing, any way you can think of, coining — how do you make, how do you stamp a coin, and what forces are going to be involved.

The other materials processing ones are probably ones that were done by Simone Belmar [Belmar?]. And he basically gives a lot of examples from some of his consulting experience of how processing in general is important. Uh, he's more of a mechanical engineer in doing this, and so it's a more general approach, like you get in a mechanical engineering course, frankly. Mine are more in-depth, okay, into the materials aspects. For example, his process is not going to get into the crystal structure and how it changes things. That's kind of a secondary effect, a very important secondary effect. Don Baskin will tell you that was critical in all the forming of automobile body sheets, okay. It has been critical for 60 years. But that, generally a mechanical engineer won't worry about that.

In fact, I think yesterday Don was talking about, um, uh, you know, looking things up in a table, okay. And I used to, when I was lecturing live, I would bring in a piece of aluminum bar, okay, and I would say what's this? And I'd ask the students, and some students say well, it's metal. Well, that's correct. Another student would say well, it looks like it's aluminum. And that's correct. And if I was a metallurgist I would say it's 6061 T6 aluminum, okay, which is a specific alloy and a specific heat treatment.

It turns out every engineering group has its own phraseology or semantics or whatever you want to call it, okay. Civil engineers use S for stress, mechanical engineers and materials engineers use sigma for stress. And so if you go to a civil engineering book you've got to kind of learn the notation, because everybody uses things that are different. I used to call this learning to be multilingual. If I'm talking to an audience of a bunch of managers, okay, uh, I have to talk managees [manager-ese], okay, which is kind of slow school technology, and they would be happy with "it's a bar of aluminum." But if I'm talking to a bunch of metallurgists I'd better tell them it's 6061 T6, because they're going to know the difference and they're going to be concerned about the difference. And if I don't answer that question for them, their mind's going to be wondering about that and not paying attention to the rest of what I'm talking about.

You have to speak to your audience, okay. And so you can't give the same lecture to everybody, although that's what I'm forced to do in teaching, which is one of the reasons I teach in parables, by telling you stories, okay. So I'll tell you a story about consulting, okay, since you brought it up.

I used to, students would ask me about how do you consult for a company. And I would point out that, well, one of the problems, uh, in consulting with the company is, management called you in as a consultant because they had their own engineers who've been looking at this problem for several weeks and can't solve it. So they're going to call someplace like MIT and find somebody who supposedly knows something. They're going to bring them down, pay them hundreds of dollars an hour. And the engineers who are making $75 an hour or whatever are not really all that happy about having someone come in. And the worst thing that expert can do is walk in and shoot from the cuff and give the answer in the first five minutes, okay.

So what happens is you go into a meeting when you get there as a consultant, and you got the managers who want the problem solved but they don't really know what the problem is — that's why they brought you in — and their engineers can't explain it to them. They just start talking engineering to them, and it's like two people talking different foreign languages, okay. And so the managers will introduce you to the engineers, will explain the engineers, the engineers will explain the problem. But they don't want to really explain everything, because if they think you're going to solve it quickly, it's going to make them look bad, okay.

So you listen to all this, and then you ask, well, can we go out in the plant and take a tour? They all say yeah, they're all ready for a break, okay. Got to get a new cup of coffee or whatever. You go out in the plant and you're walking around, and you find the foreman, okay, the hourly worker. And you find a chance to talk to that guy. And first you have to establish a little rapport with him about this pretty interesting machine you're working with here. And you ask him — or her — what the problem is, and they will tell you. They know what the problem is. The answer is right there in that company, okay.

But the managers and engineers don't respect the hourly worker who's been doing this for 40 years and knows exactly what the problem is, and has tried to tell them, and has gotten to the point where he refuses to tell him anything else. It's all communications problem. So he tells you what it is, he tells you in his jargon, his language. You go back into the conference room, you translate it into manages and engineering ease for everyone else. You walk out, you know, having solved the problem. You didn't solve the problem, you didn't know what the problem was, all you did was help them. And they still don't even understand it afterwards, even if you tell them the story, they don't understand. The answer was right there in their own factory, and they just didn't have the respect for each other to ask each other, and they didn't try to speak each other's language, okay.

It's mostly communications problems, folks. It's not technical problems. So I could tell you another story, but you have other questions? Okay, I will tell you the other story. Have I told you the donuts story from Honeywell?

So this, for those of you that might be LGO students, this is in the early days of leadership manufacturing, okay. LGO used to be LFM. And Honeywell became part of the program, and there was a, Honeywell had bought this little $50 million business down in New Jersey. And one of the students had to go do their internship down there, and I was the advisor. So we went down together to visit the site in the spring before she started in the summer.

And this little factory had been run by a, it was literally a mom and pop, a husband and wife, and started making plastic sheets — different colors, different textures, different thicknesses. You needed enough sheet to cover three football fields with this texture, this color and this thickness, they would make it for you, okay. They had all kinds of quality problems, okay.

They had a workforce that would steal each other's tools, okay. They had to lock their toolboxes from each other because they would steal each other's tools. Management would not talk to the hourly workers. The hourly workers — they wouldn't tell each other. They hated each other. It was a unionized shop, and anyway they just couldn't get along. In fact, there's the story that I called the Mad, okay. And they told us this story. There are some people that hated management so much, when they would go to the restroom, they would take their excrement and paint the walls with it. I'm sure they took some plastic gloves or something with them, and leave the carrel with, you know, this mess on the walls. And they never could find this person, but they called him the Mad, okay.

And so this student who was going to be going down there and spending her summer there, she was just sort of, you know, she couldn't believe what she was walking into, right. So we listened to all this and I said, uh, let's stop at the diner on the way back to Newark airport, and you can get a cup of coffee, I'll get some orange juice. And, uh, let's talk about this, because I didn't want to talk there at the site.

So we go back, I said, well, what are you going to do about this environment that you're going into? I mean, how are you going to solve their quality problems and stuff? She says I don't know. I said, well, I know, and I will fund this. Every Friday you're going to go and buy a box of donuts — have I told you the donut story before? Anyway, I think Steve's heard it. Anyway, but okay, but, uh, you're going to buy a box of donuts, and you're going to put it at the coffee desk for the hourly workers. And you're not going to, you know, you put it up there, wouldn't, no, not necessarily — I don't care if someone sees it, but you know, they're going to figure out that you brought them donuts. And then you're going to go out later that morning and you're going to ask them if there's anything you can do, or ask them what the problems are, and if there's anything they think you might be able to do to help things around there.

So you just gave a peace offering of a few donuts, and you're asking for things. I said, you're going to take those things and you're going to take the low-hanging fruit that you can solve. And some of them are going to be impossible things — ignore them, just solve one or two. Make a difference that next week in their environment. And within a week the foreman's going around putting his arm around her, showing her how the machine works, explaining everything to her, telling, you know, if we had this we could make better quality here. And she would go back and she would translate it for the management, and she would get them to do the investment they needed to do to improve the thing that the foreman had been telling them for six months but got tired of telling them.

There's an important principle here. I always say I don't know anyone who goes home at the end of the day saying, I did a really lousy job today, and I'm proud of it, okay. People go home and they say, I tried to do a good job today but I couldn't do a good job because of these impediments — which might be some manager that won't listen, some manager who yells at them whenever they make a suggestion, some manager who shoots the messenger, whatever. If you can get around those things, you'd be surprised at what you can do. And if, they used to call it empowerment, if you actually listen to other people's suggestions, and listen respectfully, and listen with translating ears — they may not be able to articulate it, they didn't go to college necessarily, but if you show them respect, they will show you respect. She was able to have a very successful internship just for a box of donuts every week.

And Steve, you want to say, you've seen the donut effect?

Steve: Yeah, I have. Well, sure, absolutely it works. Go ahead. I'll say also, add that the UAW also accepts donuts. It's a formidable lubricant for the United Auto Workers as well. I have personal experience with that.

Okay. So simple little things. It has nothing to do with technology. You know, this is a structural materials course. Yes, it is a structural materials course, and in those video archive modules there's lots of information, more than you can absorb in one course. But being successful has a lot more to do with donuts and respecting others than all the technology and all the differential equations in the world.

You know, frankly, if you need a differential, differential equation solved, hire an MIT grad, they can do it, okay. You don't really need to learn how to solve a differential equation. Well, actually you do if you want to graduate from MIT — you've got to learn to solve differential equations, okay, because you won't pass the quizzes. But if every quiz, was every course was like mine, you wouldn't need to solve a differential equation, okay. And Don, how many differential equations have you personally solved in your career?

Don: Um, not a lot. Um, there certainly have been some times where, um, I was working in sort of more of a research environment where, uh, that skill was useful, but as a sort of a practicing, um, engineer releasing real parts, I don't think you'll ever use a differential equation.

Well, I've only done it two or three times in my career. Um, that's really interesting. I mean I must have spent six months in school learning about differential equations, right. I mean, but, and it's an important skill, and it teaches you a thought process. The methodology you learn by learning about differential equations and how they work, you know, it's very important. But actually being able to solve a fourth-order differential equation, who cares? There are people that can be hired at a much lower rate than your salary that are happy to do it.

And things like the finite element analysis, I learned finite element analysis when I worked at Bethlehem Steel. They put me in a course, uh, I didn't, it was mid-70s, it was sort of a new technology then. I was all excited, I was going to go and solve this spot-welding problem using the finite element analysis. And I went to my boss and I said I want to do this project. He says, well no, we don't think that's worthwhile. This is in the research department of the second largest steel company in the world, okay. And I said, well, uh, I'll do it on my own time because I was interested kind of from an academic point of view. No. I said, well I'll do it on Saturdays, okay. No. I said all I need is an account number to use the mainframe computer — we didn't have personal computers in the 70s, right. And nope, they wouldn't allow me to do it.

Okay, well a couple years later I left Bethlehem Steel, or a year later I left Bethlehem Steel, because I realized they were never going to let me do anything until I had paid the price of being there for 30 years and had an attitude lobotomy like all the other managers, okay. They weren't going to allow me to do things. What really irritated me is the exact same problem was solved on the same finite element analysis, uh, and the paper was published in the Welding Journal two years later by a guy from General Electric Research named Art Need [Nied?], and he won an award for his work, okay. And I thought, okay, I had the idea, I wanted to do it, I could have had this done, but I had managers who didn't see the value in it, okay.

Well, this is supposed to be research, folks. If I saw the value in it and I knew how to do it I wouldn't need to do it, okay. So, but there's, that was part of the problem. You know, the culture of Bethlehem Steel is they wanted to clone you into their type of person. They didn't want any type — and I'm not talking ethnic or racial diversity — they didn't want any diversity of thinking. They wanted everyone to think the same.

And I don't know that I'm seeing any Japanese names right now, but I spent a year in Japan. And part of one of the strengths of Japan is they have very fixed ways of doing things. But the Japanese have criticized themselves for not being creative thinkers. Well, some Japanese are creative thinkers. But real creativity comes from going in another direction than everybody else. Okay, when everyone else is heading in one direction, you go in the opposite direction.

And actually, to tell that story, I learned that when I was seven years old at an Easter egg. And if you've ever been to a soccer game or an Easter egg, um, in a soccer game all the eight-year-olds run towards the ball, okay. They don't realize that if the soccer ball gets kicked away, they all have to run in the opposite direction, right. And so the person that could win when they're eight years old with soccer is the one who stays behind and waits for the ball to come out.

And I learned, someone said, I found an Easter egg, and everybody goes running over because they figure all the other Easter eggs are right there where they found that one. And I remember starting to run over there, and I could see the backs of all these heads, and I realized there were another 20 eyes in those 10 kids looking in the same place. And I thought, even as a seven-year-old, I'm gonna look over here, because I'll be the only set of eyes looking over here, okay. And so I started looking where other people were not looking.

And frankly, that was the source of my professional career. I would look at the field, in my field it was welding, and people were telling me oh, go do this, because the big name in welding, all of it, that he and his students were looking at welding metallurgy problems. And I said no, I'm not going to be another set of eyes looking at the same problems. Those are all bright people, I had respect for their abilities. I wanted to look where no one else was looking. And as I sometimes liken it to a farmer plowing a field — if you're plowing the same field that has been plowed for a hundred years, it's unlikely that your plow is going to turn over some gemstone. But if you're plowing a brand new field that no one's ever plowed before, it's possible that you might uncover a gemstone.

So it's best to look where other people are not looking, and use a little creativity to ask questions that no one's ever asked before. And if you want to know a success for being an academic, if you ask enough questions that no one's ever asked before, every now and then one of them will work, and you'll become famous for answering a question that no one ever asked before. And that's sort of the secret of being an academic, in my opinion. That, and having a lot of money — research money makes — and actually, and being at MIT where you have bright graduate students that you can hire and let them do the thinking, that's even better. Other questions? If not, I'll share a couple of things with you.

Student: No, I just want to resonate. I feel resume when professor talk about like creativity is like a lot of people do like one direction, you do the opposite, because I can totally feel that, because when I study at school I was majoring in just design, and then at that moment, uh, there's a big trend on like UX UI, it all works on interface, yeah, like a screen design, web design. And then most of my classmates they go that direction because the industry needs that kind of designer. And then but the truth is like as a people, as a human, we still need the physical stuff. So I still, I'm passionate object and product design. So that's why I feel like, yeah, when most people do certain direction try to do the opposite, because you could show your value and creativity from different perspective.

Yep, and that's really what creativity is about. They call things creative because it's something someone hasn't done before, right. And if you're following the crowd, whether it's nanotechnology, additive manufacturing, high-strength ceramics, okay — I mean I can go through a list — high-temperature superconductors, okay, everybody's going in the same direction. And that's when you need to stop, re-evaluating, do your every three-year evaluation or your weekly evaluation, and say, do I want to be just part of the crowd, or do I want to go and blaze a new path? And you know, nine times out of ten that new path may be fruitless, but every now and then you find a new path that's fruitful. And then people say, oh, that's the such-and-such effect, and they use your last name to describe it, okay. Other thoughts?

Steve: Just to echo Tom's, uh, Professor Eager's, uh, point here. I can tell you that, uh, in the, uh, mid-2000s working at Mercedes in Germany, they were terrified of Lexus. They used to sit around and talk about how scared they were of Lexus, to eating their lunch. And they kept focusing on how are they going to beat Lexus, how are they going to beat Lexus. At the same time Elon Musk was going a totally different direction in electric cars. Guess who end up eating Mercedes' lunch? Tesla. So talk about the success of going a different direction.

There's a great example for you. Yep, there's lots of examples if you look for them. So this has become more of a, not a structural materials recitation, which is fine. I'm more interested in giving you some thoughts from our experience. If you're willing to listen to a bunch of old people talk about their experience, um, but that actually is a little bit of respect. Do you have some respect for people who have already made the mistakes that you're going to make? Okay. And understanding that if you go out there into a factory, you don't have to solve the technical problems. The first thing you have to solve are the people problems, the communication problems.

Other questions? If not, let me just talk about one handout that I gave that you've got. We're not going to spend time on it. But, yeah. Okay, so you now should be seeing a screen that's got the Boston gas tanks, um. And this basically shows you that the blue stripe has actually got the silhouette of Ho Chi Minh, uh, the person who, the woman who developed these, uh, painted these, uh, Boston gas tank thanks, um.

Student: I think we're looking at your, uh, email here.

Oh, okay. You know, your screen share, uh, here we go. Let's, okay, now you see Ho Chi Minh in blue, the silhouette of Ho Chi Minh?

Student: Sure do, yes.

Okay, so if you go on, if you drive south on the Southeast Expressway and look at the Boston gas tanks, you'll see the silhouette of Ho Chi Minh. It was more pronounced in the more royal blue. When they repainted it and changed the tanks, they fuzzed it up a little bit. That's one thing that you might want to learn about Boston. Another one that is actually closed, Kozakovic [Kakkonen? — Corita Kent context], is the glass flowers at Harvard University, the most interesting museum in Boston by far. Nothing else like it in the world. And there's some other things here, if you have a chance and we get rid of all the restrictions from COVID, you should take a chance. Boston is a great place to learn about different things, okay. So if you're not from Boston you're gonna learn some things about the Boston area. And so that's a little list of some of those things.

Another thing I gave you, which actually is a, let's see, if this is, this should be, you should now be seeing, um, what's, a paper, I gave you the paper. It's called "Materials Research Needs for the 21st Century." This is a National Academy's Press committee. This is Appendix C, which I wrote, and this Appendix C is my Structural Materials course as of about 1, I was about 2004 or 2005. Condensed to four pages. So the question you asked at the beginning, which of my courses would be the best ones to look at — well, here's four pages that basically give you the Cliff's Notes version of 12 lectures on structural materials.

My approach, and that's part of what I was going to discuss today, some of these things. One of these is this little plot that I'm putting up right now. This is pounds per year of a material versus dollars per pound selling price, on a very large-scale log plot. And over here you have diamond, which is very expensive but they only produced 10,000 pounds. This was back in, it's actually from a 1962 internal General Electric, uh, report done by a guy named Jack Westbrook, who's a graduate of MIT Materials. Jack just passed away a couple years ago, but on this plot you can see that the most widely used material is stone, and then cement and steel, okay. Uh, they don't have wood. Well, they do have wood. The four largest usage of materials, the highest volume, are stone, cement, wood, and steel.

These four are called, I call the billion ton per year club, because if I go back to these today — and I have it in that outline, that I gave you a link to my slides. I redid this in 2014 and the plot looks almost the same. The most widely used material is crushed stone. 50 billion tons a year. You might not think of as a structural material, but it is. That's the structural material they put down underneath every railroad track, okay. For every pound of steel track they probably put a hundred pounds of crushed stone.

Why? Look, I've got a heated driveway. It's great on a day like this, it's snowing out, I have no, I have to don't have to do any snow shoveling, okay. It's all melted when I get up. Uh, but underneath that there's about two feet of crushed stone. Because when you melt these, the snow, the water's got to go somewhere. I don't have any flooding problems because of crushed stone.

And then there's engineered wood product. Or actually, the next, yeah, the next one is engineered wood product. You know that is plywood, but it's not just plywood. If you were a building contractor over the last 25 years, we don't use two-by-sixes most of the time anymore. We actually make composites out of wood that are actually beams that are lighter than a solid 2x6, okay. We make a flange out of solid wood, and a top flange and bottom flange out of a small piece of one inch by two inch wood, and then we put a piece of plywood, particle board in between. And the whole thing is lighter than a real two by four. It's easier to make. Uh, you don't have to wait 20 years to grow the tree. You can actually wait to get the wood for this in five years of growing the tree.

Um, so there are advantages to engineered wood products. Uh, I have a beam at the top of my house, it's 80 years old, but to put in solar cells on the roof, they maybe reinforce the structure. They took a new beam that was engineered wood product. It was about six inches by 24 inch cross section by 40 feet long. And they brought in a crane and lifted this thing into the top beam of my house, okay. Now, where would you get a piece of wood like that today? They used to build things like the USS Constitution out of that. But we don't have trees like that in the world anymore. Well, we can engineer it, and it's actually a stronger beam than if it was a solid tree trunk that might have knot holes and other things in it.

So engineered wood products is 3.5 billion tons a year. And the next, at 2.2 billion, is concrete. Has passed steel as the, it's for the number three spot. And that's because concrete is cheap. The problem with concrete is the same problem with, uh, crushed stone — is transportation cost. You can't afford to transport this stuff very far in most cases, unless you're doing it by ship. Uh, and you can't get everywhere in the world by ship. Um, but concrete is widely used in the third world for building buildings because it's inexpensive, it holds up in all kinds of weather. The Romans built roads out of concrete and they're still useful, okay.

And but last is steel. And after steel you drop down to aluminum at 45 million tons. Well, 45 million is a lot less than 1.5 billion in steel. 95% of all metal made in the world is steel. 95%. Why? I could show you plots, but steel has ten times the strength and toughness of stone, engineered wood, or concrete. It's ten times stronger. And as Don said yesterday, iron is cheap. It's very cheap. Cheaper than potting soil at Home Depot. Check it out, right.

Okay, it is cheaper. Well, it's just like bottled water is more expensive than gasoline now. But in any case, but yes, steel is cheaper than potting soil. I hadn't thought of that analogy before. It's cheap, it's tough, uh, and it's strong. And compared to the other three in the billion ton per year club, it's ten times better. That's why I was saying 30 years ago that we wouldn't have all aluminum cars for 25 years. And that's true, we didn't have them for 25 years. But four or five years ago, whenever we got the F-150, we now have some all-aluminum cars in high volume. The primary structure in the F-150 is not aluminum, it's steel.

Student: Yep, okay, bladder crystal, yeah.

So there's still a lot of steel even in the F-150. And you wouldn't want to be in a wreck if you didn't have steel in a car, okay. It still have a lot of steel. And Don will go through that — he's going to give you the figures of merit. On, when I said you know you'll get things at different levels, Don goes about three or four levels deeper than I go with structural materials, okay. He gets into a lot of the fine details that you need to know to make a competitive product. I give you the broad-brush academic approach. Which was one of the questions earlier, okay.

Well, that's enough for today. I think I may schedule one for Monday, because I didn't show you the whole steel thing, and there were a fair number of questions, and maybe we had some other people who didn't make it. But that's enough for today. Um, I appreciate your attending, and I appreciate the questions.

Student: Thanks, we'll see you next week.

See you, thanks, we'll see you next week, everybody. Okay, you don't have to come, folks, but I'm not going to hold it. If you don't, have a good weekend. Thanks.