I was reading a car magazine during my visit to my gearhead brother Rich’s house last weekend, and came across an article about a racing driveshaft… made of aluminum.

I asked if he ever imagined when he got into that stuff 25 years ago that he’d live to see such a thing.  For anyone who remembers what we could do with aluminum back then, his “no” answer is all too predictable.

My world of bicycle stuff is similar — it was a massive breakthrough when Gary Klein made a boron-reinforced aluminum frame that you could actually ride back in the early ’80s.  But the now-ubiquitous aluminum, carbon fiber and titanium frames have made steel-framed bicycles a novelty.

And Rich and I had a similar conversation — this one centered around Matchbox-sized toy cars — about the improvements in plastics, the point being that plastic toy car parts are at least as good as some of the pot metal parts that frustrated us in our day.  (The makers of those cars desperately need either to go back to the old style axles we enjoyed, though, or apply some of the materials advances there too — the ridiculously thin-gauge and easily bent wire they use for the purpose now is entirely unacceptable.)

There’s been so much ink — real and electronic — spilled about the computer and electronics end of the technology revolution.  And the advances in those realms deserve the attention.  Still, we take far too much for granted in the advances in materials science.  So it’s nice to see this article, which means we may soon see even more unfathomable uses of lightweight aluminum.