The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

Imaginary minerals are the topic of today’s bizarre Wikipedia article, brought to you by the Wikiworm, ceaseless miner of useless knowledge…

Unobtainium is a word used in engineering, fiction, and thought experiments, to describe any fictional, extremely rare, costly, or impossible material, or (less commonly) device needed to fulfill a given design for a given application. The properties of any particular unobtainium depend on the intended use. For example, a pulley made of unobtainium might be massless and frictionless; however, if used in a nuclear rocket, unobtainium would be light, strong at high temperatures, and resistant to radiation damage. The concept of unobtainium is often applied flippantly or humorously.

Since the late 1950s, aerospace engineers have used the term “unobtainium” when referring to unusual or costly materials, or when theoretically considering a material perfect for their needs in all respects, except that it does not exist. By the 1990s, the term was in wide use, even in formal engineering papers such as “Towards unobtainium [new composite materials for space applications].” The word unobtainium may well have been coined in the aerospace industry to refer to materials capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures expected in reentry. Aerospace engineers are frequently tempted to design aircraft which require parts with strength or resilience beyond that of currently available materials.

Later, unobtainium became an engineering term for practical materials that really exist, but are difficult to get. For example, during the development of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, Lockheed engineers at the “Skunk Works” under Clarence “Kelly” Johnson used unobtainium as a dysphemism for titanium. Titanium allowed a higher strength-to-weight ratio at the high temperatures the Blackbird would reach, but the Soviet Union controlled its supply and was trying to deprive the US armed forces of this valuable resource.

In the 1970s, bicycle magazines, such as Bike World, sometimes referred to exotic lightweight bicycle parts as being made of unobtanium, although while expensive they were commercially obtainable.

As of 2010, the term has diffused beyond engineering, and appears in the headlines of mainstream newspapers, especially to describe the commercially useful rare earth elements (particularly terbium, erbium, dysprosium, yttrium, and neodymium). These are essential to the performance of consumer electronics and green technology, but the projected demand for them so outstrips their current supply that they are called “unobtainiums” within the ore industry, and by commentators on the US Congressional hearings into the “supply security” of rare-earths.

The term handwavium (suggesting handwaving) is another term for this hypothetical material, as are buzzwordium, impossibrium, hardtofindium, flangium, and, less commonly, phlebotinum.