What are ceramics? Premium

Discover the history, properties, and modern applications of ceramics, from ancient civilizations to cutting-edge technology in 200 words.

Take some nonmetallic, inorganic material and fire it to a high temperature, and you’ll have a ceramic. The word comes from the Greek ‘keramos’ or ‘potter’s clay’, speaking to a common application of ceramics in ancient times.

This said, there is record of humans having made and used ceramic objects for more than 25,000 years. Archaeologists have discovered ceramic pottery and figurines in the ruins of various ancient civilisations, including those in the Indus Valley and in Keezhadi in Tamil Nadu. The colours found on these materials, their shapes and designs, and their purposes have hinted at their origins and the processes the members of each civilisation used to make them.

Ceramics can typically withstand very hot or acidic environments, many forms of chemical erosion, and are hard and difficult to compress. But they are also brittle — i.e. can shatter — and don’t handle shear, or sliding, stress well. The science of preparing and studying ceramics’ microscopic properties is called ceramography.

In modernity, scientists have used ceramics on space shuttles (as part of the heat shield during atmospheric reentry), to produce heat in microwave furnaces, as abrasives, in the production of varistors and semiconductors, as nuclear fuel, in fighter aircrafts’ windows, and in tomographic scanners, among other settings. The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in some ceramic materials won two scientists the 1987 physics Nobel Prize.