The following picture demonstrates the cycle of life for a material.

The Materials cycle is the evolution of a raw materials to product. Some materials come directly from a natural state; but most materials used today are processed (manufactured) into an engineered product. Materials design and production has always been the key to the growth of civilization since the beginning of human history.

The history of materials science is like the Egyptian pyramids. Material science started with the development of base materials like the common brick (a composite of clay/sand/straw used in building the pyramids) and has progressed into the development of small and complex parts like the integrated circuits in modern microcomputers.


Fig 1. The above chart shows the progression of materials through history.

Egyptians of the past felt that preserving dead bodies was important, so they developed relatively complex processes to form a composite material (i.e. the mummy).

Some of us today might feel that the speed of our computers is important. So, there are new developments of "nano-transistors" to increase speed and reduce size of the present day integrated circuits (the fundamental building block for the computer's processor).