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How Silica Gel Took over the World
Silica gel packets seem like the only thing keeping our packaged food crispy and our belongings free of mildew. How on earth did they all get here?
Zoom in on a silica gel bead with a scanning electron microscope, and its smooth surface turns discontinuous, riddled with voids about 2.5 nanometers across (roughly the diameter of a strand of DNA). While glass and glassy substances have been used by humans for many thousands of years, it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that Walter Patrick, a researcher at Johns Hopkins, developed and patented an efficient way to create silica gel. In this sense silica gel sits alongside containerized shipping, and stretch wrap, and bills of lading: It is a technology without which we’d have a much harder time maintaining global supply chains.
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