Amelia Chan, age 10, of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, for her question:

Exactly what is meant by ceramics?

This is a happy story that started way back when our ancestors lived in caves. Already they had learned how to create and control fire. They kept a campfire going to shed warmth and to scare away night prowling animals. They learned to cook meat and how to char sticks to make harder spikes for their spears and arrows. Then they discovered that the campfire also could bake pots to hold food.

Host likely the cave dwellers made this wonderful discovery by accident. The family used stones to build a hearth for the precious campfire. Some of the stones started out as rather moist chunks of earthy clay. Somebody, perhaps the mother, noticed that the heat of the fire changed these chunks of clay. They became hard dry material.

Then one day she had a brilliant idea. She molded some of the pasty clay to form a hollow shape and she placed it right in the fire. The result was a pot, perhaps the first piece of pottery ever made by human hands    the first piece of what we now call ceramics.

It was fun to mix a muddy paste from clay and water. It was fun to model it into a shape and more fun to let it bake in the fire. The finished object might be something useful or a splendid work of art. No wonder pottery making was so popular back in caveman days.

The making of ceramic objects never went out of style and through the years the work improved. Nowadays, we use hundreds of different recipes and fire them in huge furnaces. In North America, ceramaics is a multi billion dollar business and the list of ceramic items is as long as your arm. However, many folk still like to use the old style methods to create vases and other artistic ceramics.

The ceramics industry makes bricks to build houses, red tiles for the roofs and shiny glazed tiles for the floors. The main ingredients for these items are clays and water. The pasty mixtures are baked in huge slow ovens called kilns. Silicon carbon and perhaps other ingredients are added to make fire resistant bricks to line furnaces. Earthenware dishes are ceramics, so are fine chinos and porcelains. The glossy glazes used to coat these objects also are ceramics. The list goes on and on.

In the world of industry, special ceramic recipes are used to make spark plugs, electric insulators and hundreds of other useful items. New space age ceramics are called certnets    because they behave somewhat like ceramics and somewhat like metals. They are very hard and brittle and able to stand super high temperatures. Some cermets are used to line jet engines, others are made especially for space traveling.