In 2013, a Spanish company called Cosentino launched a countertop material called Dekton. It resists heat, scratches, stains, and shattering. It took six years and nearly $200 million to develop. It is, more or less, porcelain.
Porcelain is roughly three thousand years old. The interesting part is not that we are still improving it. It is that the improvements keep arriving disguised as something else.
The kiln
The first step toward porcelain happened in northern China, when potters started working with kaolin, a chalk-white clay, and firing it at around 1,200°C.
Clay is stacks of plate-like crystals held together by hydroxyl groups. Heat breaks those bonds, the plates reform into needle-shaped crystals that lock together, and at porcelain temperatures the silica melts into a glassy liquid that fills the gaps. The result is dense, translucent, and strong.
The recipe was not enough. Ordinary kilns could not hold that heat; their vents let it escape almost as fast as it was produced. Chinese potters designed downdrafts, forced the hot air out through floor vents, and invented heat-resistant bricks so the kilns would not melt. Porcelain was a system: clay, fuel, kiln, brick, technique.
The failure
Porcelain reached Europe in the 13th century and became an obsession. "White gold." European elites spent fortunes trying to make it and failed for centuries, mostly because nobody knew the key ingredient was kaolin, or that kaolin alone was not enough without ground "China stone."
They got close enough to invent maiolica, faience, and Delftware — beautiful, but not porcelain. Not impermeable, not strong, and it did not ring when you tapped it.
The theft
The breakthrough is a story about a con man and a polymath.
Count Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus spent decades focusing sunlight with lenses and mirrors, burning minerals to see what they did. In the winter of 1693–94 he found a clay that would not melt, and made a hard, yellowish, translucent ceramic he called "wax porcelain." He could not scale it.
Meanwhile Johann Friedrich Böttger, a Prussian alchemist, claimed he had discovered the Alltinktur, a substance that cured disease and turned base metal into gold. Prussia's king had him taken into custody; he escaped to Saxony, where Augustus the Strong locked him in a fortress and ordered him to produce gold. He could not. Augustus eventually assigned Tschirnhaus to supervise the alchemy project; Tschirnhaus, who cared nothing for gold, redirected Böttger to porcelain instead.
By 1708 they had it. Tschirnhaus died that October. Böttger claimed sole credit, and Meissen became Europe's porcelain center.
The hip
Dekton is porcelain pressed at 25,000 tonnes and fired at 1,200°C until atoms diffuse across particle boundaries and the slab becomes one solid mass. It is Porcelain 3.0, and it ends up under a frying pan.
Better examples exist. "Wet-activated" tiles that grip when water hits them, preventing the kind of fall that permanently injured Charles C. Mann's mother-in-law. Bioceramic scaffolds that dissolve as bone grows into them. Lithium disilicate dental implants.
The kid
Mann told his son how remarkable it all was — the thin slab of porcelain he cooks on, the hip, the tile. His son gave him a blank look. He had never lived in a world that was not made of porcelain.
That is the whole essay in one reaction. The most important materials are the ones nobody notices, and the surest sign that a technology has arrived is that it becomes invisible.
Source: Everything rhymes with porcelain — Charles C. Mann, Works in Progress.