Everyone knows the story of the three little pigs, right? Each pig had a different plan for defending himself from the wolf. One pig constructed a house with straw, and another pig built his home with sticks.
Sadly, those two pigs soon learned that while it’s easy to build with straw and wood, houses made with those materials don’t last long. With a huff and a puff, their houses came tumbling down.
The smartest little pig built his home from brick. That’s a strong building material that kept out the big bad wolf, no matter how hard he blew. But if those pigs had lived in the Arctic, for example, they would have had a tough time finding clay for bricks – or even sticks.
For thousands of years, people’s choices of building materials were limited by the resources around them. If trees grew nearby, they built their houses of wood. Stones and boulders made building blocks in some places, while snow and ice were the only construction materials to be found in others.
Today, the three little pigs could build houses of steel, glass, plastic, fiberglass, and titanium. No ordinary wolf could make a dent in a steel home, no matter how hard he blew.