Why can’t China make a ballpoint pen?
There is what’s regarded in China as a “classic” question of manufacturing.
The manufacturing powerhouse of the world finds it difficult to make this, despite making 80% of the world’s pens.
As it turns out, the ballpoint of the ballpoint pen—a tiny metal ball bearing that “mimics the action of roll-on deodorant,” rotating freely in a small socket to dispense a smooth stream of ink—is fiendishly difficult to make, requiring super precise machinery and high-quality steel made to very specific standards.
The same goes for semiconductor grade poly silicon.
There is monocrystalline solar grade polysilicon, which has up to nine nines (99.9999999 per cent). Indeed, the vast, vast majority of polysilicon goes towards solar panels, and the vast, vast majority of that is made in China. What is striking, however, is that China has yet to master the manufacture of the pièce de résistance
of the silicon world: semiconductor grade polysilicon. This can have as many as ten nines (99.99999999 per cent purity), where for every impure atom there are essentially 10 billion pure silicon atoms.
This and a lot more tidbits in the book I am currently reading – Material World – by Ed Conway.
One more – on low-background steel.
This is a metal that is completely uncontaminated with radionuclides – a type of nuclear energy – and is essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices. And producing low-background steel from scratch is essentially impossible today.
Ever since the first atomic bombs were detonated, Earth’s atmosphere has contained tiny amounts of nuclear contamination – isotopes such as cobalt-60. The quantities are so small that they pose little discernible risk to humans and they are gradually diminishing, but since steelmaking involves spraying oxygen into the lava mix and since that oxygen is obtained from the air, there is still no way of making steel without tiny amounts of radionuclides finding their way in.
Hence, the only way of getting hold of low-background steel is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945. Old sunken battleships are a particularly popular source.
If only education was this fascinating, isn’t it? What drudgery we were subject to, reading (mugging up) botanical classification and periodic tables, when we could just as well have been let loose to discover such nuggets of information and possibly be more learned?