In the decades to come, however, there would be many more
claimants to wonder-working glory—among them other metals,
polymers, ceramics, blends called composites, and the
electrically talented group known as semiconductors. Over the
course of the 20th century, virtually every aspect of the
familiar world, from clothing to construction, would be
profoundly changed by new materials. High performance materials
would also make possible some of the century's most dazzling
technological achievements: airplanes and spacecraft, microchips
and magnetic disks, lasers and the fiber-optic highways of the
Internet. And behind all that lies another, less obvious,
wonder—the ability of scientists and engineers to customize
matter for particular applications by manipulating its
composition and microstructure: they start with a design
requirement and create a material that answers it. Of the
various families of metals represented among high performance
materials, steel still stands supreme in both versatility and
volume of pr