Masonry oven and the fire won't burn well. Modern masonry ovens sometimes bear little resemblance to their forebears, and can have just a cast deck (similar to a pizza stone) inside a more conventional oven exterior. Such devices are primarily used in commercial settings, though tabletop models are available. Cob is the British name for what is essentially adobe (from Arabic, "al toba," meaning "the mud;" "cob" is the Anglo-Saxon word for "lump," and is also used to describe round loaves of bread, or small, compact horses). As the most common building material on the planet, earth, clay and "cob" construction have
Ceramic engineering World War II encouraged developments, which created a need for high-performance materials and helped speed the development of ceramic science and engineering. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, new types of ceramics were developed in response to advances in atomic energy, electronics, communications, and space travel. The discovery of ceramic superconductors in 1986 has spurred intense research to develop superconducting ceramic parts for electronic devices, electric motors, and transportation equipment. There is an increasing need in the military sector for high-strength, robust materials which have the capability to transmit light around the visible (0.4–0.7 micrometers) and mid-infrared (1–5 micrometers) regions of