Schatzberg 2003

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Symbolic Culture and Technological Change: The Cultural History of

Aluminum as an Industrial Material
Eric Schatzberg
Enterprise and Society / Volume 4 / Issue 02 / June 2003, pp 226 - 271

DOI: 10.1017/S1467222700012234, Published online: 18 February 2015
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Eric Schatzberg (2003). Symbolic Culture and Technological Change: The Cultural History of Aluminum as an Industrial Material.
Enterprise and Society, 4, pp 226-271 doi:10.1017/S1467222700012234
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Symbolic Culture and Technological
Change: The Cultural History
of Aluminum as an Industrial Material
ERIC SCHATZBERG
The history of aluminum illustrates how the concept of symbolic

meanings can help connect culture with business history. Alumi-
num’s symbolic meanings played a crucial role in its industrial
history, largely through the enthusiasm that greeted the introduction
and diffusion of the metal. Symbolic meanings influence technologi-
cal innovation through their role in shaping expectations, a role
understood by the historical actors who engage in struggles over
the meanings of competing innovations. For aluminum, this struggle
centered on the conflict between the material’s two major mean-
ings: aluminum as modern and aluminum as ersatz. This debate
over meanings has played out differently in aviation, electric wiring,
and automobiles.
From its first commercial production by Henri Deville in 1858, alu-

minum has benefited from more sustained enthusiasm than any other
modern material. Nonprofessionals, scientists, engineers, and indus-
trialists have waxed poetic about the metal’s contributions to the pro-
gress of civilization. From one perspective, aluminum has met these
expectations, becoming the most important nonferrous metal of the
present age. From another viewpoint, however, aluminum has never
quite fulfilled the ambitions that its proponents imagined for it. De-
spite repeated predictions of a coming “aluminum age,” aluminum
Enterprise & Society 4 (June 2003): 226–271.  2003 by the Business History
Conference. All rights reserved.
ERIC SCHATZBERG is associate professor in the Department of the History of
Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Contact information: 7129
Social Science Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706–1393,
USA. E-mail: [email protected].
In the long gestation of this article I received invaluable help from Robert Friedel,
Helmutt Maier, Ken Lipartito, Colleen Dunlavy (and the participants in her indus-
trial history workshop), and Jonathan Zeitlin. An earlier version of this article
was commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art; I thank Sarah Nichols and
her staff for their support.
226
The Cultural History of Aluminum 227
remains the “metal of the future,” still overshadowed by steel, wood,

and plastics.
These divergent readings of the history of aluminum are embed-
ded in the contested symbolic meanings of the material. Symbolic
meanings, I argue, provide a means to link the concept of culture
with the business history of technological innovation. In particular,
understanding symbolic meanings sheds new light on the enthusi-
asm that helps propel new technologies, from the railroad to the In-
ternet, to commercial success. Aluminum benefited from precisely
this type of enthusiasm, which was grounded in the symbolic linking
of aluminum with modernity. Yet aluminum also had to contend
with contrary meanings, most importantly the perception that it was
a cheap substitute, an “ersatz” material. These incompatible mean-
ings came into conflict during competition with alternative materi-
als, with different meanings becoming dominant in different con-
texts.
Why should business historians care about the symbolic meanings
of aluminum, a topic that seems better suited to cultural or art histo-
rians? Popular perceptions may influence consumer demand for cer-
tain materials, but one would not expect industrial applications to
depend in any way on such secondary characteristics. Rather, the
history of aluminum seems bound to corporate research, resource
endowments, materials markets, industrial structure, and govern-
ment policy, topics that historians of aluminum have already exam-
ined in detail.1 Indeed, these topics must remain central to the indus-
trial history of aluminum. Yet, without attention to the symbolic
meanings of aluminum, this history will remain incomplete.2
In a 1995 article Kenneth Lipartito called on business histo-
rians to take culture seriously. Lipartito attacked the dominant
“functionalist” approach to business history as both empirically in-
adequate and theoretically flawed. According to Lipartito, culture
“adds the missing pieces” for explanations that move beyond func-
tionalist models, because culture forms an interpretative framework
that strongly shapes actors’ understanding of the world and hence
1. See George David Smith, From Monopoly to Competition: The Transforma-

tion of Alcoa, 1888–1986 (New York, 1988); Margaret B. W. Graham and Bettye
H. Pruitt, R&D for Industry: A Century of Technical Innovation at Alcoa (New
York, 1990); Donald H. Wallace, Market Control in the Aluminum Industry (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1937); Brad Barham, Stephen G. Bunker, and Denis O’Hearn,
States, Firms, and Raw Materials: The World Economy and Ecology of Aluminum
(Madison, Wisc., 1994).
2. Robert Friedel makes a similar argument using somewhat different termi-
nology in “Some Matters of Substance,” in History from Things: Essays on Mate-
rial Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington, D.C., 1993),
45–46.
228 SCHATZBERG
their actions. Cultural analysis has already begun to “reshape” the

field of business history, according to Philip Scranton and Roger
Horowitz, especially in consumption studies, where business and
cultural history naturally intersect.3 The concept of culture has had
less influence, however, in one core area of business history: the in-
novation and diffusion of industrial technologies.4
Business historians do not bear sole or even primary responsibil-
ity for the failure of culture to become central in their field. Much of
the fault lies with the concept of culture itself and with its uses in
cultural history and cultural studies. Among major ideas in the so-
cial sciences, culture stands out for the breadth and incompatibility
of its major meanings, which seem to be perpetually at war, under-
mining the analytical utility of the idea.5
The solution lies not in trying to settle this intractable debate, but
rather in showing the utility of specific aspects of culture in histori-
cal explanations. Since the 1980s historians have drawn on the idea
of culture as a symbolic (or semiotic) system.6 This notion has its
3. Kenneth Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Business

and Economic History 24 (Winter 1995): 1–52, quotation at p. 23; Philip Scranton
and Roger Horowitz, “‘The Future of Business History’: An Introduction,” Busi-
ness and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 3. See also Kenneth Lipartito, “Busi-
ness History and Business Culture,” Business History Review 73 (Spring 1999):
126–28, and Thomas J. Misa, “Toward an Historical Sociology of Business Cul-
ture,” Business and Economic History 25 (Fall 1996): 55–64. For an overview of
the cultural studies of consumption, see Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt, eds.,
The Consumer Society Reader (New York, 2000). For a discussion of consumption
studies in business history, see Marina Moskowitz, “Standard Bearers: Material
Culture and Middle-Class Communities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,”
Enterprise & Society 1 (Dec. 2000): 693–94. “Corporate culture” provides another
avenue for connecting culture and business history. See William H. Becker, “Pres-
idential Address: Managerial Culture and the American Political Economy,” Busi-
ness and Economic History 25 (Fall 1996): 1–8.
4. A notable exception is Kenneth Lipartito, “Picturephone and the Informa-
tion Age: The Social Meaning of Failure,” Technology and Culture 44 (Jan. 2003):
50–81. The lack of attention to culture is clear in the exemplary aluminum histo-
ries sponsored by Alcoa: Smith, From Monopoly to Competition; Graham and
Pruitt, R&D for Industry. For a partial exception to this neglect of the cultural
aspects of aluminum in business history, see Florence Hachez-Leroy, L’Alumi-
nium Français: L’Invention d’un Marché, 1911–1983 (Paris, 1999).
5. Terry Eagleton is particularly good on teasing out these meanings, focusing
on the basic tension between culture as a way of life and culture as a sphere of
universal values. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford, U.K., 2000), chap.
2. Social scientists have been struggling to tame these diverse meanings for de-
cades; see for example the exhaustive study by anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber
and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions
(Cambridge, Mass., 1952).
6. An alternative approach, which views culture as a form of practice, has
great promise for business history, particularly as a way of making connections
to theories of organizational routines and other forms of satisficing behavior. Yet
the idea of culture as practice does not eliminate the problem I deal with here,
roots in the work of Leslie White, Ernst Cassirer, and others, but it
became widely known through the work of anthropologist Clifford
Geertz. Geertz defines culture as a “historically transmitted pattern
of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions
expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate,
perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward
life.” For Geertz, then, culture provides the context that gives human
action meaning.7
The idea of culture as a symbolic system is, however, problematic
for business history. Since the “linguistic turn” of the 1970s, cultural
analysis has become increasingly distanced from material practices.
In particular, cultural studies tend to reduce material practices to
questions of meaning, following the metaphor of social life as a text.8
This tendency reaches its extreme in the work of poststructuralist
social theorists, most notably Jean Baudrillard, who portrays post-
modern capitalism as “hyperreality,” an endless chain of signifiers
with no ultimate reference to material life.9 Such an approach is of
little use for business historians, for whom the economic and mate-
rial worlds of production, distribution, and consumption remain
central.
Such excesses do not, however, imply that business historians
should dispense with the idea of symbolic culture. Material and eco-
nomic processes cannot be subsumed into the sphere of symbols,
but neither can symbolic meanings be reduced to the transcultural
but merely shifts it to the relationship between symbolic practices and material
practices. See Richard Biernacki, “Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices
in Cultural Inquiry,” History and Theory 39 (Oct. 2000): 289–310. On routines,
see Naomi Lamoreaux, Daniel Raff, and Peter Temin, “New Economic Approaches
to the Study of Business History,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997):
73–75. Thanks to Kenneth Lipartito for suggesting that I deal with this issue.
7. For the idea of culture as a symbolic system, see Clifford Geertz, Interpreta-
tion of Cultures (New York, 1973), 89; Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Intro-
duction,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society
and Culture, ed. Bonnell and Hunt (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 2–3; Biernacki, “Lan-
guage and the Shift from Signs to Practices,” 293; William H. Sewell, “The Con-
cept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 35–61.
8. For a recent, well-argued version of this criticism, see Biernacki, “Language
and the Shift from Signs to Practices.” For a related critique of science and tech-
nology studies, see Margaret Jacob, “Science Studies after Social Construction:
The Turn Toward the Comparative and the Global,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn,
ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 95–120. For a philosophical critique of the application of
the text metaphor to social action, see John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory
of Ideology (Cambridge, U.K., 1984), chap. 5, esp. 190–91.
9. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York, 1983). For a discussion of
Baudrillard’s movement away from material culture, see Mark Gottdiener, Post-
modern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life (Oxford,
U.K., 1995), 34–52.
230 SCHATZBERG
imperatives of neoclassical economics or the material base of Marxist

theory.10 Technological innovation always involves creating new mean-
ings along with new artifacts and material practices. Failure on the
symbolic level can be just as devastating to the success of an innova-
tion as failure on the material plane.
The role of symbolic meanings is clearest in shaping demand for
consumer goods.11 This influence is not limited to the final con-
sumer. According to Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “all technologies have
consumers, . . . whether the ultimate consumers are located in the
consumption domain (as householders are) or in some other domain
(wholesale, retail, or production).”12 Business decision makers do not
dwell in a world of pure reason insulated from the affective realm
that shapes consumer choices. As Naomi Lamoreaux and others have
argued, rational-actor accounts of business decisions are largely un-
tenable. In the face of uncertainty, claims Lamoreaux, such decisions
depend heavily on how problems are “framed.” For Lamoreaux,
framing is an active process shaped primarily by business leaders,
but she remains vague about what constitutes a frame.13 Certainly
framing includes strategic political alliances, tradeoffs between
short- and long-term goals, and contingent judgments about local
economic interests, all of which are aspects of business leadership.
But, insofar as leaders make judgments in the face of uncertainty,
10. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976).

11. Classic studies of advertising support this conclusion, despite subsequent
critiques of this literature for treating consumers as passive receptacles. See Vance
Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, 1957); Stewart Ewen, Captains of
Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New
York, 1976); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way
for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 1985). For a model study of consumer
culture that stresses the active role of consumers in shaping product innovation,
see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from
Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore, Md., 2000).
12. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Re-
search Strategies in the Sociology of Technology,” in The Social Construction of
Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technol-
ogy, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, Mass.,
1987), 261–80, quotation at p. 273. In this article, Cowan actually criticizes sim-
plistic explanations of consumption based on symbolic meanings, focusing in-
stead on how changes in industrial structure explain changes in consumption.
Cowan is persuasive on this specific point (competition between the open hearth
and the cast iron stove), but one cannot decide a priori that industrial structure
(or similar “objective” factors) will carry more weight than symbolic meanings.
13. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Reframing the Past: Thoughts about Business Lead-
ership and Decision Making under Uncertainty,” Enterprise & Society 2 (2001):
639–45. For a discussion of how uncertainty undermines rational-actor accounts
of technological change, see Giovanni Dosi and Massimo Egidi, “Substantive and
Procedural Uncertainty,” Journal of Evolutionary Economics 1 (1991): 145–68.
they always draw on the systems of symbolic meaning in which

those judgments are embedded.14
Symbolically shaped expectations play a central role in the inno-
vation process. New technologies are invariably like newborn babes,
coming to fruition only after a long period of nurturing. Within a
firm or organization, support for a particular developmental path de-
pends on expectations of future performance, not on existing practi-
cal benefits: if such benefits already existed, there would be no need
to fund research and development (R&D).15 Expectations continue
to shape technological change after an innovation leaves the firm
and enters the market, as path dependence theory demonstrates.
Learning curves and system economies of scale generally have their
sharpest influence at early stages of diffusion, reducing costs and
increasing benefits with each additional adopter. Expectations of
success can push a technology far enough down the learning curve
to give the innovation a clear lead over its rivals. Both within the
firm and in markets with increasing returns, therefore, expectations
can become self-fulfilling.16 Self-fulfilling expectations are a ten-
dency only, but one that can be exploited strategically by proponents
of particular technologies.17
14. This somewhat cryptic comment is loosely based on Gadamer’s analysis

of judgment as a hermeneutic process. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and
Method, 2d ed. (New York, 1989), esp. 277–341.
15. For a classic discussion of how uncertainty pervades R&D investments,
see Donald Schön, Technology and Change: The New Heraclitus (New York,
1967). On expectations see Nathan Rosenberg, “On Technological Expectations,”
in Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, ed. Nathan Rosenberg (New
York, 1982), 104–19.
16. W. Brian Arthur, “Positive Feedbacks in the Economy,” Scientific Ameri-
can 292 (Feb. 1990): 92–99; “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business,”
Harvard Business Review 74 (July–Aug. 1996): 100–109; and Paul A. David, “Un-
derstanding the Economics of QWERTY: The Necessity of History,” in Economic
History and the Modern Economist, ed. William N. Parker (New York, 1986), 30–
49. See also W. Brian Arthur, “Competing Technologies: An Overview,” in Tech-
nical Change and Economic Theory, ed. Giovanni Dosi et al. (London, 1988),
594–95. On the relationship between path dependence theory and other eco-
nomic models of technological change, see Vernon W. Ruttan, “Induced Innova-
tion, Evolutionary Theory and Path Dependence: Sources of Technical Change,”
Economic Journal 107 (Sept. 1997): 1520–29, as well as the responses by
Giovanni Dosi, “Opportunities, Incentives and the Collective Patterns of Techno-
logical Change,” ibid., 1530–47, and Gavin Wright, “Towards a More Historical
Approach to Technological Change,” ibid., 1560–66.
17. Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin have criticized evolutionary economics
in general and path dependence theory in particular for applying natural-selec-
tion models that displace actors’ strategic choices. The conflict between path
dependence theory and strategic action is not inherent, however. Brian Arthur
argues that business decision makers can act strategically according to their im-
plicit understanding of path dependency. Sabel and Zeitlin, “Stories, Strategies,
232 SCHATZBERG
One powerful type of expectation is technological enthusiasm,

which is in essence the symbolic link between a particular technol-
ogy and the cherished values of a culture. In the Western world this
enthusiasm most typically expresses itself as a link between technol-
ogy and the idea of progress, a recurring phenomenon in business
history. Such enthusiasm typically follows a boom-and-bust cycle;
railroads, electric power, commercial aviation, and nuclear power
have all experienced similar waves of enthusiasm, excess capacity,
financial crisis, and disappointment—the Internet is merely the most
recent example.18 In the mid-1990s the Gartner Group, a leading
technology-consulting firm, coined the term “hype cycle” to describe
this process. In a typical hype cycle, a new technology experiences
a “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” followed by a “Trough of Disillu-
sionment” and then a “Plateau of Productivity.”19 Path dependence
theory helps explain why this cycle of expectations is so common.
Enthusiasm is almost essential for a major innovation to reach matu-
rity, but inflated expectations can also doom a new technology when
the predicted results fail to materialize.
Symbolic structures do not, however, simply bestow meanings of
progress on worthy innovations. Symbolic meanings generally in-
volve connections between specific technological applications and
larger cultural values. Historical actors forge these links through con-
text-dependent interpretations of the larger symbolic system. Such
interpretations must be reconstructed for each new application of
a technology.20 Aluminum in cookware, for example, did not carry
and Structures: Rethinking Historical Alternatives to Mass Productions,” in World

of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (New
York, 1997), 8–11; W. Brian Arthur with Dominic Gates, “The PreText Interview,”
PreText Magazine, May/June 1998, URL: http://www.pretext.com/may98/columns/
intview.htm.
18. Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York, 1964); David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings
of a New Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Joseph J. Corn, Winged Gospel:
America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900–1950 (New York, 1983); James J. Jasper,
Nuclear Politics: Energy and the State in the United States, Sweden, and France
(Princeton, N.J., 1990), 41–73.
19. Bruce Fox, “Staying Ahead of the ‘Hype Cycle,’” Chain Store Age 72 (Jan.
1996): 148; Jack Schofield, Victor Keegan and Neil McIntosh, “The Hype Cycle,”
Guardian (London), 3 Jan. 2002, Guardian Features Pages, 10. The Gartner Group
has recently added more stages to the hype cycle: an initial “Technology Trigger”
along with a “Slope of Enlightenment” that precedes the “Plateau of Productiv-
ity.” See Jack Fenn, Kevin Haley, and Alexander Linden, Management Update:
The Gartner 2001 Hype Cycle—Emerging Trends and Technologies, Note Number
PTP-08312001–02 (31 Aug. 2001) (accessed through the Gartner Group intraWeb
database, 1 May 2002).
20. My argument here is a common one, drawing on arguments by thinkers
like Umberto Eco who insist that signs take on determinate meanings only when
interpreted in specific contexts. See Gottdiener, Postmodern Semiotics, 24.
the same symbolic meaning as aluminum in airplanes. Furthermore,

proponents of competing technologies understand this interpretative
process, and they therefore engage in a politics of meaning aimed at
shaping expectations to their advantage.21 Local politics of meaning
can transform the larger symbolic system, which is nothing more
than the accumulation of local meanings over time. Aluminum to-
day, for example, has lost much of its early high-tech luster, in part
through its association with mundane artifacts like beer cans and
cheap cookware.
In what follows, I examine the rhetoric of aluminum to show how
the broader symbolic meanings of the material have developed. The
associated rhetoric followed a pattern of enthusiasm and disappoint-
ment not unlike the hype cycle, producing a tension between two
major meanings: aluminum as high-tech and aluminum as ersatz. Al-
though enthusiasm remained dominant in popular discourse as ob-
servers repeatedly predicted a coming “age of aluminum,” statistics
show that the aluminum age never quite materialized; despite im-
pressive growth, aluminum production remains far behind that of
other leading industrial materials. The failure to realize inflated ex-
pectations formed the context for continued conflict between the ma-
jor meanings of aluminum, a conflict whose outcomes proved quite
different in three distinct applications: aviation, electrical wiring,
and automobile bodies.
Aluminum: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm
By influencing technological expectations, the symbolic meanings of

aluminum played a key role in its development as an industrial mate-
rial. Historians do not have direct access to these symbolic meanings
but can infer them from the figurative language of the discourse of
aluminum as revealed in trade publications and the popular press.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, proponents of aluminum
21. Thomas Edison, for example, engaged in the politics of meaning when he
sought, with some success, to cast doubt on the safety of alternating current by
linking it to the new electric chair. See Paul A. David, “The Hero and the Herd
in Technological History: Reflections on Thomas Edison and the Battle of the
Systems,” in Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth, and Economic Develop-
ment since the Industrial Revolution, ed. Patrice Higonnet, David S. Landes, and
Henry Rosovsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 72–119. For another example of the
politics of meaning, see Eric Schatzberg, “Culture and Technology in the City:
Opposition to Mechanized Street Transport in Late-Nineteenth-Century
America,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes
and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Michael Allen and Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge,
Mass., 2001), 57–94.
234 SCHATZBERG
made repeated claims that quickly became standard tropes in the rhet-
oric surrounding the metal. Advocates of aluminum invoked its physi-
cal beauty, its incorruptibility (that is, its resistance to corrosion), its
lightness, and its abundance, all of which supported an overarch-
ing claim: aluminum was the “metal of the future.” Critics sometimes
challenged this rhetoric by portraying aluminum as an “ersatz” and
deceptive material. Nevertheless, the symbolism of modernity domi-
nated the discourse of aluminum throughout the twentieth century.
As Robert Friedel has shown, following Deville’s production of
commercially usable amounts of aluminum in the 1850s nonspecial-
ists, scientists, and engineers all waxed poetic about aluminum’s
coming contributions to the progress of civilization. This rhetoric
intensified in the 1890s after Charles Martin Hall and Paul T. L.
Héroult independently developed the electrolytic method for refin-
ing aluminum.22 Aluminum, seemingly immune to corrosion and
with only one-third the weight of steel, was “among the most eagerly
discussed questions of the day,” according to an 1893 editorial in
the British weekly the Spectator inspired by Alfred Gilbert’s alumi-
num statue of Eros. The Spectator’s writer rhapsodized about this
“new and exquisite metal,” whose “very existence is an example of
the possibility of the inconceivable.” With repetitious hyperbole, the
editorial hailed aluminum as “beautiful to the eye, whiter than sil-
ver, and indestructible by contact with the air . . . strong, elastic and
so light that the imagination almost refuses to conceive it as a metal.”
New methods for refining aluminum were likened to a “philoso-
pher’s stone” that would make real the “old fancy of the transmuta-
tion of metals” by extracting “silvery” aluminum from “shapeless”
clay. Just as “the world has seen its age of stone, its age of bronze,
and its age of iron, so it may before long have embarked on a new
and even more prosperous era—the age of aluminium.”23
Such enthusiastic rhetoric was no anomaly, but rather the typical
response to aluminum in advanced industrial nations. Other histori-
ans have noted this striking faith in aluminum’s future, even though
such confidence was difficult to justify on technical grounds. In her
study of early responses to aluminum, Marie Boas Hall remarked upon
the “incredible and wild optimism” that aluminum inspired among
industrial chemists, an optimism “which it was, unjustifiably as one
might think, to continue to engender until optimism became truth.”24
22. Robert Friedel, “A New Metal! Aluminum in Its 19th-Century Context,”

in Aluminum by Design, ed. Sarah Nichols (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2000), 59–83.
23. “The Future of Aluminium,” Spectator 71 (July 1893): 76–77.
24. Marie Boas Hall, “The Strange Case of Aluminium,” History of Technology
1 (1976): 145, 148.
Key to this faith in aluminum’s future was the metal’s symbolic

association with modernity and the ideology of technological prog-
ress. By the late nineteenth century, most Americans and many Euro-
peans had come to define progress in material and technological
terms, displacing earlier moral conceptions engendered by the En-
lightenment. That ideology held sway among engineers and applied
scientists through most of the twentieth century, despite periodic
criticism from humanistic intellectuals.25
An 1890 article by Amos Wright in Harper’s Weekly made the
rhetorical connection between aluminum and material progress
quite explicit. Wright nicely summarized the emerging ideology of
technological progress, arguing that “the advance of civilization . . .
is due greatly more to the harnessing of the forces of nature and the
mastery over matter than it is to the teaching of the schools, the
preacher, and the orator.” Cheap production of aluminum would bring
untold benefits to humanity. In a single sentence Wright invoked all
the standard tropes of pro-aluminum rhetoric: “Aluminum, aside
from its lightness and strength, is malleable, ductile, does not rust,
is as beautiful as silver, and is much more abundant in its native
state than any metal in use.” Its lightness most captured Wright’s
imagination. He predicted that aluminum would permit a two-thirds
reduction in the weight of bridges, steamships, and other structures,
so that “the Eiffel Tower as a constructive feat would sink into insig-
nificance.” If aluminum lived up to the “reasonable hopes” of its
advocates, “mankind would seem to have been emancipated from a
burden of heavy material which it had been wrestling with for
ages.”26
Wright’s article marks one extreme of pro-aluminum rhetoric.
What is most striking about enthusiasm for aluminum, however, is
not its presence but its persistence. From the telegraph to the In-
ternet, new technologies have been accompanied by what Perry
Miller termed the rhetoric of the technological sublime, which in-
vests technology with religious meaning, moral authority, and uto-
pian expectations.27 Such rhetoric usually declines with the success
25. Leo Marx, The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology,
and Culture in the United States (New York, 1988), 185; Merritt Roe Smith,
“Technology, Industrialization, and the Idea of Progress in America,” in Responsi-
ble Science: The Impact of Technology on Society, ed. Kevin B. Byrne (San Fran-
cisco, Calif., 1986), 9–10; John Staudenmaier, “Perils of Progress Talk: Some His-
torical Considerations,” in Science, Technology, and Social Progress, ed. Steven L.
Goldman (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 270–74.
26. Amos W. Wright, “The Age of Aluminum,” Harper’s Weekly 34 (6 Sept.
1890): 707–8. I was not able to locate any biographical information about Wright.
27. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass., 1994);
James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” in
236 SCHATZBERG
of a new technology, and unfulfilled expectations are then trans-

ferred to new systems. Aluminum, in contrast, continues to be hailed
as the metal of the future more than a century after its introduction
into industrial use.
Several factors have contributed to the persistent perception of
aluminum as a modern, progressive material. First is the notion of
aluminum as a product of science, in contrast to traditional metals,
which were seen as based on craft knowledge. According to historian
Helmut Maier, this view goes back to Deville, who included alumi-
num among the “metals of the scientific age . . . brought into visible
existence by the pile of Volta.”28 With the success of the electrolytic
Hall-Héroult process, aluminum became firmly linked with electric
power, a “sublime” technology and one of the most powerful sym-
bols of progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Even Lewis Mumford, usually a perceptive critic of technology, was
entranced by the utopian possibilities of aluminum.29
Despite this pervasive enthusiasm, a counterdiscourse soon
emerged to challenge the claims of aluminum’s proponents. Begin-
ning in the 1890s, when aluminum first became available in quanti-
ties sufficient for industrial use, aluminum experienced the “trough
of disillusionment” of the Gartner Group’s hype cycle. Sober techni-
cal observers quickly discovered that aluminum was ill suited to
most industrial applications. Early attempts to fabricate aluminum
parts resulted in “every ill to which metal fabrication is heir.”30 In
1897 the Engineer condemned the “nonsense” that had been spread
concerning aluminum, which attracted “that class of persons whose
imaginative powers are largely in excess of their intellectual facul-
ties.”31 The following year a lively debate emerged among the mem-
bers of the Paris Académie des Sciences, prompted by an attack on
aluminum’s resistance to corrosion by chemist M. A. Ditte. Noting
the belief in aluminum’s “remarkable . . . resistance to most chemi-
cal agents,” Ditte claimed that “this resistance does not exist.” Rather
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, ed. James W. Carey

(Boston, Mass., 1989), 113–41; Corn, The Winged Gospel, esp. chap. 2.
28. It was Maier who first stressed the significance of the symbolism of alumi-
num as scientific. Helmut Maier, “New Age Metal or Ersatz? Technological Uncer-
tainties and Ideological Implications of Aluminium Up to the 1930s,” ICON 3
(1997): 181–201; quote from J. Barlow, Engineer 1 (1856), in Maier, 184.
29. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934), 230–31. On
electricity as a symbol of progress, see Nye, Electrifying America.
30. Quoted in Wallace, Market Control in the Aluminum Industry, 10. See
also Maier, “New Age Metal or Ersatz,” 189–90.
31. “New Aluminium Alloys,” Engineer 83 (1897): 355, quoted in Maier,
“New Age Metal or Ersatz,” 185.
than one of the most stable of metals, aluminum was one of the most
reactive, a fact hidden by the protective properties of the oxide layer.
Aluminum was an impostor, “a metal whose real properties have
almost nothing in common with those it appears to have.”32
In response to such criticism, some of aluminum’s more techni-
cally adept supporters decried excessive enthusiasm for the metal.
Ditte’s paper provoked a reply from fellow academician Henri Mois-
san, a strong partisan of aluminum. Moissan attacked Ditte’s experi-
mental work, but he also condemned the “overzealous neophytes”
who exaggerated the advantages of aluminum “while pompously
baptizing it ‘the metal of the future.’” Aluminum, claimed Moissan,
deserved neither excessive praise nor undue criticism. A similar
complaint was heard from Joseph W. Richards, a leading American
expert on aluminum. “The oft-repeated statement that aluminium
will replace steel for bridges, steamships, machinery, etc., is a fal-
lacy,” stated Richards, because aluminum possessed no advantage
over steel in terms of its ratio of strength to weight.33
Even if the early hyperbole faded a bit in response to the sober
reality of limited industrial uses, enthusiasm for aluminum resur-
faced with every new application and metallurgical advance. The
First World War in particular helped revive the cultural status of the
white metal. According to a popular journal, the war made alumi-
num “one of the most desirable metals for any nation that wished to
wage war.”34 Powdered aluminum made an excellent explosive, and
the war forged definitive links between aluminum and aviation. Al-
though few airplanes were constructed primarily of aluminum, the
material did find limited use in cowlings, small castings, and espe-
cially engine parts. Germany also built a fleet of military Zeppelins
with structures of a new aluminum alloy. Military applications of
aluminum gave manufacturers invaluable practical experience with
the uncommon metal, which helped aluminum gain new markets
after the war, especially in the automobile industry. Perhaps even
more valuable for aluminum was its symbolic association with flight,
though wood, canvas, and steel remained the dominant airplane ma-
terials until the early 1930s. According to economist Donald Wal-
lace, the use of aluminum in Zeppelins and Liberty airplane engines
32. M. A. Ditte, “Sur les propriétés de l’aluminium,” Comptes Rendus de

l’Académie des Sciences 127 (1898): 919.
33. Henri Moissan, “Sur les applications de l’aluminium,” Comptes Rendus
de l’Académie des Sciences 128 (1899): 900; Joseph W. Richards, “Aluminium—
The Metal of the Future,” Cosmopolitan 12 (1892): 284. See also Wallace, Market
Control, 14.
34. “Vindication of Aluminum,” Current Opinion 60 (Feb. 1916): 110.
238 SCHATZBERG
“accomplished more advertising in two years for this industry than

a decade of New York copy could have done.”35
Increased familiarity with aluminum also brought a measure of
contempt, especially in Germany, where wartime shortages forced
the widespread use of aluminum as a substitute for copper. Germany
created a wartime aluminum industry almost overnight, using elec-
tricity from brown-coal power plants rather than the more economi-
cal hydroelectricity. As Helmut Maier explains, German users of alu-
minum, both industrial and domestic, experienced it as an inferior
substitute [Ersatz] for traditional materials, thus contributing to the
negative connotation of the German word, a connotation shared
equally in German and English.36
Yet the war’s net effect on aluminum was clearly positive, stimu-
lating both demand and enthusiasm for the metal. By 1923 primary
aluminum production had already surpassed wartime levels. Popu-
lar articles heralding the coming aluminum age reappeared in the
1920s and 1930s, announcing, in effect, the start of a second hype
cycle. Although “once hailed as ‘the metal of the future,’” opined
the Literary Digest in 1927, aluminum was “nearly discarded as a
grievous disappointment.” In alloyed form, however, “aluminum
now bids fair to justify all the early hopes of its friends.” In a 1922
interview, Columbia University chemist Charles F. Chandler pre-
dicted skies teeming with aluminum airplanes and highways “throng-
ing with aluminum automobiles.”37
By demonstrating the military uses of aluminum, World War I
also helped forge a symbolic link between aluminum and national-
ism. Enthusiasm for aluminum in France was strengthened by the
country’s large bauxite reserves. In 1927, for example, Charles Grard,
Inspecteur Général de l’Aéronautique, published a detailed article
promoting aluminum as a metal that “at all its stages of production
35. Wallace, Market Control, 43–46, quotation at p. 46. Wallace cites an ex-
traordinary claim that 90,000 tons of aluminum were used for Allied aircraft in
1918 alone. The improbability of this figure is apparent when one considers that
the major belligerents produced about 170,000 airplanes for the entire war, the
vast majority being small observation planes and fighters built almost entirely of
wood and canvas, with empty weights typically less than 3,000 pounds.
36. Maier, “New Age Metal or Ersatz,” 191–92. Plastics experienced a similar
tension, simultaneously symbolizing both a high-tech “miracle material” and “a
third-rate substitute.” Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), quotation at p. 154.
37. Sterling Brubaker, Trends in the World Aluminum Industry (Baltimore,
Md., 1967), 35; “Aluminum Comes Back,” Literary Digest 93 (7 May 1927): 22;
M. K. Wisehart, “The Wonder Story of Aluminum,” American Magazine 93 (May
1922): 142; see also “The Aluminum Age,” Science 77 (10 Feb. 1933): supp. 7.
is nourished exclusively by our national substance.”38 In Germany

aluminum became a key element in National Socialist Autarkiepoli-
tik after 1933. Nazi propaganda explicitly rejected the labeling of alu-
minum as ersatz and instead identified aluminum as a key Heimstof
that would minimize German dependence on imports, even though
Germany relied on Hungary and Yugoslavia for most of its bauxite.
German aluminum production increased ninefold from 1933 to 1938,
when Germany surpassed the United States to become the world’s
largest producer of primary aluminum.39
With the onset of the Second World War, aluminum finally
emerged as an indispensable industrial material, as all the major
combatants committed vast resources to building fleets of aluminum
aircraft. Early in the war the Allies experienced major aluminum
shortages that threatened to constrain aircraft production. The U.S.
and Canadian governments funded a huge expansion in aluminum
refining, aided by the large reserves of hydroelectricity available in
both countries. While German aluminum production stagnated be-
cause of electricity shortages, American production increased four-
fold and Canadian production increased sixfold, providing the Allies
with more than enough aluminum to meet their production goals.40
The large increase in refining capacity posed a dilemma for the
postwar aluminum industry, especially in the United States. The
new capacity was devoted to aviation, an industry highly dependent
on military purchases. Both corporate profits and national security
demanded that new markets be found to sustain the added capacity,
keeping it available for the next war. Aluminum was still not firmly
established in the civilian market, as demonstrated by the relative
ease with which the Allies diverted almost their entire aluminum
output to the aviation industry during the war. As early as 1943,
the American business community and government agencies began
searching for postwar applications of aluminum. To encourage wider
postwar consumption, the aluminum industry quite self-consciously
promoted a variety of new uses for the light metal. Published discus-
sions contained less of the unrestrained rhetoric so characteristic of
earlier portrayals, but even sober analysts made enthusiastic projec-
38. Charles Grard, “Le siècle de l’aluminium,” Revue Scientifique 65 (1927):

4–12, 41–48, quotation at p. 5.
39. Maier, “New Age Metal or Ersatz,” 192–93; Helmut Maier, “‘Austausch-
metall’ und ‘Stromfresser’: Aluminium im Dritten Reich,” Praxis Geschichte 5
(1993): 33–36; Brubaker, Trends, 38.
40. Eric Schatzberg, Wings of Wood, Wings of Metal: Culture and Technical
Choice in American Airplane Materials, 1914–1945 (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 192–
95, 217–18, 220–21; Brubaker, Trends, 38.
240 SCHATZBERG
tions for aluminum’s future. A detailed wartime survey by Business

Week, for example, claimed that potential supplies of aluminum were
“so nearly unlimited that they challenge the imagination.”41
Worldwide, the 1950s were golden years for the aluminum indus-
try, with production expanding some threefold from 1950 to 1960, a
rate faster than in any decade since 1910.42 This rapid growth, stimu-
lated in large part by Cold War military requirements, helped sustain
enthusiasm for aluminum despite the industry’s maturity. In a 1953
speech to a group of electrical engineers, Alcoa’s president I. W.
Wilson waxed poetic on the relationship between aluminum and hu-
man progress. In rhetoric reminiscent of the 1890s, Wilson traced the
progress of human civilization through the ages of stone, copper, and
iron, finally invoking “the present Aluminum Age.” By continuing
to develop new uses for aluminum, insisted Wilson, the assembled
engineers were meeting “the challenge of tomorrow” and “thus achiev-
ing a better life for ourselves and our fellow men.”43
By the late 1960s the material that had been “hailed as the metal
of the future for 81 years” had finally arrived. Aluminum executives,
“always an enthusiastic lot,” admitted that their industry was ma-
ture, but they still predicted annual production growth rates of 10
percent worldwide. Nuclear power seemed to guarantee continued
growth by freeing aluminum from its reliance on fixed hydroelectric
sites. With huge increases expected in transportation, electrical, and
packaging uses, the future of aluminum continued to look bright.44
The rise of environmentalism and the energy crises of the 1970s
only slightly dampened faith in the future of aluminum as an indus-
trial material. Although aluminum is far more energy-intensive in its
production than any other major material, the aluminum industry
adapted itself to the rhetoric of environmentalism by embracing re-
cycling and the energy-saving potential of lightweight aluminum
structures. In 1978, National Geographic published a gushing article,
written in close cooperation with Alcoa, describing aluminum as
“the magic metal.”45 The article presented aluminum as a ubiquitous
41. “The Light Metals: A Wartime Reconnaissance of Their Postwar Position,”

Business Week (28 Aug. 1943), 43; U.S. Senate, Special Committee to Study and
Survey Problems of Small Business Enterprises, Hearings: The Future of Light
Metals, With Particular Reference to the Interests of Small Business, 79th Cong.,
1st sess., part 49 (Washington, D.C., 1945).
42. Production statistics from Brubaker, Trends.
43. I. W. Wilson, “Man’s Distinctive Work,” in Proceedings of the Conference
on the Electrical Utilization of Aluminum (New York, 1955), 2, 4.
44. “Metal of the Future Is Getting There,” Business Week (24 June 1967),
116–18.
45. Thomas Y. Canby, “Aluminum, the Magic Metal,” National Geographic
145 (Aug. 1978): 186–211. Some correspondence with Alcoa related to this article
material of unlimited versatility, revisiting all the standard tropes,

including the belief that “our era may be called the Aluminum Age.”
The optimistic rhetoric of aluminum continued, with trade journals
in the 1990s predicting large increases in aluminum use for automo-
biles, housing, and bridges.46
Aluminum Statistics
Symbolic culture is not tightly bound to material practices, but the

gap between expectations about aluminum and its actual achieve-
ments is revealing. This gap has served as a sort of forcing function,
a cultural pressure that helps push new applications of aluminum
down the learning curve. The extent of this gap becomes clear when
one looks for evidence of the long-predicted “aluminum age.”
Comparisons of industrial commodities provide a rough measure
of aluminum’s significance relative to other materials. Worldwide,
aluminum production grew faster than that of any other major metal
in the twentieth century, from 7,300 metric tons of virgin aluminum
in 1900 to 23.4 million metric tons in 2001, doubling or tripling
every decade from 1910 to 1970. In 1900 aluminum was a minor
nonferrous metal, far behind copper, zinc, lead, and tin. After World
War II aluminum surpassed all other nonferrous metals in weight,
and by 1997 total aluminum production (primary and secondary)
was comparable to the combined tonnage of all other major nonfer-
rous metals.47
Still, this dramatic increase did not usher in an age of aluminum.
Iron and steel remain by far the dominant metals, a status unchanged
since the Industrial Revolution. Before World War II world alumi-
num production was minuscule compared to that of iron and steel.
Because steel consists of a large percentage of recycled scrap, the
most appropriate comparison is between primary aluminum and
iron. In 1950 world iron production was still almost ninety times
that of aluminum. Even in 1987, after decades of impressive postwar
is available in a folder titled “Publication ‘Aluminum, the Magic Metal,’” in

Series IX, Marketing and Sales, Subseries 2, Product Information, Aluminum
Company of America (Pittsburgh, Pa.), Records, 1888–1990, Historical Society of
Western Pennsylvania Archives, MSS no. 282, Pittsburgh [hereafter, Alcoa Rec-
ords, HSWP].
46. For example, see Jane Lichter, “Aluminum Applications Expand,” Ad-
vanced Materials & Processes 150 (Oct. 1996): 19.
47. Brubaker, Trends, 35; Wallace, Market Control, 46; U.S. Geological Sur-
vey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2002, Jan. 2002 (URL: http://minerals.usgs.
gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/).
242 SCHATZBERG
growth, world iron production remained thirty times greater. The

ratio of iron to aluminum dropped slightly during the 1990s to about
twenty-five to one by 2001, but in absolute terms the growth in world
pig iron production from 1999 to 2000 was 50 percent greater than
the entire world output of primary aluminum in 2000. A comparison
of primary and secondary aluminum to steel, which includes the ef-
fects of recycling, reveals a similar picture. Even the United States,
the world’s largest producer of aluminum, consumed sixteen times
more steel than aluminum in 2000.48 Steel remains by far the domi-
nant metal in every major industry except commercial aviation.
Going beyond metals shows how far the world is from an alumi-
num age. Since World War II, production of synthetic plastic resin
has grown even more impressively than aluminum output did in the
first half of the twentieth century. By 1996 American companies
were shipping about 32 million tons of plastic resins for domestic
use, nearly four times the weight of aluminum shipments.49 The late
twentieth century looked more like the age of plastics than the age
of aluminum. Even traditional nonmetallic materials contribute more
to industrial civilization than aluminum. Worldwide, nonfuel timber
production in 2000 amounted to some 1.6 billion cubic meters, of
which 610 million cubic meters were turned into structural wood
products (sawn wood, veneers, and wood panels). In comparison,
primary aluminum production in 2000 amounted to 9 million cubic
meters (24.4 million metric tons). The picture changes little if one
looks at industrialized countries and includes secondary aluminum.
Americans, for example, used seventy-eight times more structural
wood than aluminum by volume in 1997. Even in terms of weight,
Americans in 2000 used some seventeen times more wood than alu-
minum, roughly the same proportion as steel to aluminum. Further-
more, the United Nations predicts an annual worldwide growth rate
for nonfuel timber production of 2.7 percent until 2010, making it
48. Brubaker, Trends, 35–36; U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity

Summaries 2002; U. S. Geological Survey, Minerals Yearbook 2000 (URL: http://
minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/myb.html); U.S. Geological Survey, Historical
Statistics for Mineral Commodities in the United States, U.S. Geological Survey
Open-File Report 01–006, version 5.3 (URL: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/
pubs/of01–006/), modified 7 May 2002. Proponents of aluminum argue that its
relative importance to steel should be measured in terms of volume, not weight,
which would reduce the ratio of steel to aluminum by roughly 2.8. However,
aluminum almost never replaces steel by volume, because of the substantially
lower strength of aluminum. Furthermore, comparisons based on volume would
favor wood and plastics over aluminum. Whatever measure one uses, however,
aluminum is still far overshadowed by other materials.
49. CRB Commodity Yearbook 1998 (New York, 1998).
unlikely that the ratio of wood to aluminum will change signifi-

cantly.50
We thus live in an age of steel, wood, and plastics much more
than in an age of aluminum, and the early twenty-first century prom-
ises no fundamental change. These facts in no way diminish alumi-
num’s impressive achievements, which pale only in comparison to
the great expectations that were thrust upon the metal. The continu-
ing gap between those expectations and aluminum’s actual achieve-
ments demonstrates the durability of its symbolic meanings.
Aviation: Aluminum as Progress
Since at least the First World War, aluminum has signified both the
quintessentially modern and the cheap substitute. These conflicting
meanings are embedded in symbolic structures that people use to
make sense of the world. One cannot simply decode the meaning of
aluminum from its place in the symbolic structure, however; rather,
such structures provide a framework that allows historical actors to
construct specific and often conflicting interpretations.51
These specific meanings of aluminum never arise in isolation, but
always in relation to competing industrial materials. Aluminum has
a unique combination of properties, but applications rarely require
aluminum to the exclusion of alternatives. Relative prices are impor-
tant but not decisive.52 In some contexts, such as airplane design be-
fore World War II, aluminum’s technical characteristics outweighed
its higher price, giving it a “high-tech” aura. In other applications,
however, aluminum’s appeal rests largely on its cost. In these in-
stances, such as aluminum electrical wiring, aluminum is often per-
ceived as ersatz. The automobile represents an intermediate situa-
50. Calculated from United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO
Yearbook, Forest Products, 2000 (Rome, 2002). For the 2.7 percent growth projec-
tion, see United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Forestry Statistics
Today for Tomorrow: 1945–1993–2010 (Rome, 1995), 15. Recent trends suggest
that this projection is optimistic, but the growth rates of wood and aluminum
production have been similar in recent years, producing little change in their
ratio.
51. Ann Swidler argues that culture provides a varied “toolkit” that actors use
selectively to achieve their goals. I prefer the more constraining metaphor of cul-
ture as framework. See Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,”
American Sociological Review 51 (April 1986): 273–86.
52. Merton J. Peck, Competition in the Aluminum Industry, 1945–1958 (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1961), 22–23; Brubaker, Trends, 52.
244 SCHATZBERG
tion, in which aluminum appears simultaneously as high-tech and

ersatz.
In aviation the material aluminum sought to replace, wood,
shaped the cultural meaning of the metal. Wood remained the domi-
nant material for airplane structures into the 1930s. Yet from the end
of World War I engineers and airplane designers strove to replace
wood with metal in airplane structures, insisting that metal in gen-
eral, and aluminum in particular, was technically superior to wood.
Closer examination reveals that cultural meanings were embedded
in these arguments against wood. Aluminum emerged as the victor
in part because of its cultural status as a metal.53
One would not expect cultural meanings to play a large role in
the selection of airplane materials, particularly in the choice of alu-
minum over wood. In such choices technical criteria should trump
cultural factors. Wood seems to come up short by numerous criteria,
including resistance to fire, strength-to-weight ratio, durability, and
suitability for large-scale production. Historically, all of these
arguments were used to justify the development of metal airplanes
between the world wars. On examination, however, every one of the
claimed advantages appears equivocal. The choice of materials de-
pends on the specific context of applications, and for airplanes in
the 1920s the technical criteria did not dictate the choice of metal.54
Although the vast majority of the 170,000 military airplanes pro-
duced during World War I used wood frameworks, the war did mark
the first significant success for metal airplanes. A thousand German
fighters were built with Anthony Fokker’s welded steel tube fuse-
lage, but another German development proved more potent symboli-
cally: the all-metal airplanes of Hugo Junkers. The Junkers were the
first production airplanes to be built primarily of aluminum alloys,
specifically the new duralumin wrought alloys, which developed the
tensile strength of mild steel.55 After the Armistice, Junkers and other
German designers used the experience gained during the war to pro-
duce all-metal passenger transports built predominantly of dural-
umin.
The German all-metal airplanes generated tremendous enthusi-
asm after the war. Commentators noted the use of aluminum but de-
voted most of their praise to metal in general. In a standard litany,
engineers and technical journalists contrasted the troublesome quali-
53. Except as noted, this section is based on Schatzberg, Wings of Wood.

54. For a detailed comparison of these technical characteristics, see ibid.,
chap. 3.
55. On duralumin see Maier, “New Age Metal or Ersatz,” 194; Graham and
Pruitt, R&D for Industry, 169–72.
ties of wood with the advantages of metal. In late 1920 their view
received authoritative endorsement in the annual report of the Na-
tional Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the U.S. govern-
ment’s principal aeronautical research agency. According to that
report,
The war was fought with machines constructed of wood, which

from many standpoints is most unsatisfactory. . . . Wood has a
nonhomogeneous structure, is uncertain in strength and weight,
warps and cracks, and weakens rapidly when exposed to moisture.
The advantages of using metal construction for airplanes are ap-
parent, as the metal does not splinter, is more homogeneous, and
the properties of the material are much better known and can be
relied upon. Metal also can be produced in large quantities, and
it is felt that in the future all large airplanes must necessarily be
constructed of metal.56
The displacement of wood by metal would not be as easy as the

NACA report implied. In the United States more than a decade of
repeated failures ensued before metal airplanes competed success-
fully with wood.
The chief problem plaguing early designers of metal airplanes was
weight, or, more precisely, the ratio of weight to strength. To be use-
ful, an airplane has to carry not only its own empty weight but also
a “useful load” consisting of passengers, freight, gas, oil, and crew.
This design imperative placed a premium on lightweight, high-
strength materials.57 In a typical example of technological uncer-
tainty, it proved difficult in the 1920s to determine which material
would produce the lightest structure. Early flying machines demon-
strated that some woods made excellent lightweight structures. In
terms of some key properties, such as ultimate tensile strength,
spruce was lighter than all but the strongest steel, though other mea-
sures put it slightly behind steel or aluminum. Moreover, wood had
one tremendous advantage over metals that could not be captured in
basic strength properties—its resistance to buckling under compres-
sion, a common source of failure for thin airplane parts. Low density
gives materials a tremendous advantage in buckling strength, allow-
ing parts to be much thicker for equal weight. In sheets of equal
buckling strength, aluminum weighs two and a half times more than
56. U.S. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, Annual Report, 6th
(Washington, D.C., 1920), 52–53.
57. T. P. Wright, “Aircraft Engineering,” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 131 (May 1927): 30.
246 SCHATZBERG
plywood, and steel weighs five times more.58 Wood’s superior buck-
ling strength does a great deal to explain its dominance in early air-
plane structures. Likewise, aluminum’s significant advantage over
steel helps explain why it quickly became the preferred metal for
flight.
Despite the enthusiasm prompted by post–World War I Junkers
airplanes in the early 1920s, manufacturers found it difficult to de-
velop all-metal airplanes that could compete effectively with mixed
wood and metal designs. Preventing buckling failures required com-
plex systems of reinforcement and the use of curved parts, elements
that substantially increased production costs. In the early 1920s
the U.S. Army and Navy spent roughly $2 million on experimental
metal airplanes without arriving at a single satisfactory model. In 1925
Henry Ford threw the expertise of his automobile empire behind the
development of aluminum airliners. Despite his manufacturing prow-
ess, Ford was never able to produce his famed Trimotors at a cost
close to that of airplanes with mixed wood and steel structures.
Despite claims for aluminum’s “incorruptibility,” the metal had
serious durability problems, especially in alloyed form. In the early
1920s evidence of dangerous corrosion began to emerge in duralu-
min airplane structures. In 1925 the U.S. Bureau of Standards identi-
fied the problem as intercrystalline embrittlement, an insidious form
of corrosion that penetrates into the metal along the grain bound-
aries, weakening the material while leaving the surface largely
unchanged.
By the late 1920s the “peak of inflated expectations” for alumi-
num airplanes had given way to a shallow “trough of disillusion-
ment” because of problems with weight, cost, and durability. Quipped
one leading aeronautical engineer, “for durability and dependability
I’ll have my all-metal airplanes made of wood.”59
Yet disillusionment did not translate into reduced R&D for alumi-
num airplanes. The discovery of intercrystalline corrosion in 1925
led to an increase rather than a reduction in aluminum research. Al-
though no American airplane then in production relied on duralu-
min alloys, the Bureau of Standards, in close collaboration with
Alcoa, launched a crash program to solve the problem. Researchers
soon discovered that bonding a pure aluminum coating to the alumi-
58. See J. E. Gordon, Structures: Or, Why Things Don’t Fall Down (New York,
1978), 285–95.
59. Joseph S. Newell, comment in H. V. Thaden, “Metallizing the Airplane,”
ASME Transactions, Aeronautics 52 (1930): 171. See also “Discussion on Aircraft
Materials,” American Society for Testing Materials, Proceedings 30, pt. 2 (1930):
171–214.
num alloy substantially reduced the danger of intercrystalline em-

brittlement. Alcoa introduced its version of this solution in 1927
under the trade name “Alclad.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army and Navy also continued to fund R&D
in aluminum airplanes during the 1920s and early 1930s, despite
earlier failures. The Navy spent an additional $1.5 million before
developing a serviceable all-metal flying boat in 1929. The Army
continued to fund experimental aluminum airplanes, obtaining a ser-
viceable all-metal bomber in 1931 (the Boeing B-9) and an all-metal
fighter in 1932 (the Boeing P-26). The famous aluminum airliners of
the early 1930s, such as the Douglas DC-2, emerged from this intense
military development effort. Douglas was one of the most successful
military aircraft builders of the interwar period, having learned alu-
minum-alloy construction under numerous experimental contracts
with the Army and Navy. The DC-2 completed what historian John
Rae termed the “airframe revolution,” the emergence of stressed-
skin, fully streamlined aluminum airplanes. Although the engines
have changed from pistons to turbojets, most subsonic aircraft still
rely on structures and materials similar to those used in the DC-2.
What sustained the aeronautical community’s faith in metal air-
planes? Although such faith was not unreasonable, it is not clear
why, given the uncertainty over the technical issues, aluminum alloy
construction should have received the lion’s share of R&D funding.
One key element of the explanation lies in the symbolic meanings of
competing materials. For aeronautical engineers after World War I,
wood symbolized preindustrial technologies and craft traditions,
whereas metal represented the industrial age, technical progress, and
the primacy of science. Wood seemed out of place in the airplane,
one of the most potent symbols of progress in the early twentieth
century. Engineers were quite explicit in linking metal with prog-
ress, using rhetoric much like that applied to aluminum. In the early
1920s proponents insisted that the shift to metal was the inevitable
consequence of technical progress. “All the history of engineering
relates the gradual displacement of timber by lighter and more dura-
ble structures of steel,” argued John D. North, a prominent British
airplane designer. J. B. Johnson, the U.S. Army’s chief expert in avia-
tion materials, echoed those sentiments: “There is little doubt that
the future airplane will be built entirely of metal on account of its
uniformity and permanency.”60
60. John D. North, “The Case for Metal Construction,” Journal of the Royal
Aeronautical Society 28 (Sept. 1923): 3; J. B. Johnson, “Metals Used in World
Cruiser Airplanes,” Iron Age 114 (16 Oct. 1924): 994.
248 SCHATZBERG
The debate over airplane materials suggests that specific meanings

of aluminum were not simply given by the symbolic system, but
rather emerged through a politics of meanings adapted to the partic-
ular context—here, competition with wood. The debate over air-
plane materials had little to do with aluminum itself. Rather, the
discussion centered on an opposition between two dichotomous cat-
egories, wood and metal, that was mapped onto the opposition be-
tween tradition and modernity. The focus on metal dominated the
arguments even of aluminum’s advocates. Since World War I Alcoa
had encouraged the use of aluminum alloys in aircraft. In 1930 the
company published Aluminum in Aircraft, a detailed technical man-
ual for the aircraft industry. The first chapter, entitled “The Natural
Trend to Metal,” did not begin by advocating aluminum. Instead, it
encapsulated a decade of pro-metal rhetoric, providing a list of
eleven qualitative reasons that supposedly made the trend from
wood to metal “inevitable.” Only after the company established the
inevitability of metal’s use was the question of “which metal” raised.
In contrast to the culturally charged discussion of wood and metal,
the analysis of aluminum and steel was presented in sober, if some-
what misleading, quantitative terms.61 Support for metal airplanes
clearly drew on the broader cultural enthusiasm for aluminum, but
the precise meaning of aluminum in aviation was shaped by its com-
petition with wood.
Since the 1970s the stressed-skin aluminum airplane has ap-
peared a less permanent solution in light of the rise of fiber-
reinforced composites. The term “composites” is itself an exercise in
symbolic politics, a neologism designed to obscure the link between
composites and plastics. Despite the great technical promise of the
new composite materials, which provide strength-to-weight ratios
exceeding that of any metal, they have found only limited use in
aircraft. In part, this failure results from technical limitations, espe-
cially problems in manufacturing and maintenance. The equally vex-
ing problems faced by aluminum alloys in the 1920s were soon over-
come. But composites lack the symbolic advantage that aluminum
had in its competition with wood, despite attempts by advocates of
composites to seize the rhetoric of progress for the new materials.62
In contemporary debates, as in the past, symbolic meanings continue
to shape the course of technological change.
61. Aluminum in Aircraft (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1930), 5–10.

62. Competition from composites has also spurred the development of new,
lighter-weight aluminum-lithium alloys. See Graham and Pruitt, R&D for Indus-
try, chap. 10.
Aluminum as Ersatz: Electrical Wiring
Aviation was one of aluminum’s greatest triumphs, connecting the

metal of the future with the transport of the future, confirming alumi-
num’s cultural status as a high-tech material. Aluminum’s other in-
dustrial uses did not fit so easily with this high-tech image. When
aluminum competed with traditional nonferrous metals, its chief ad-
vantage was typically price. Such was the case early in aluminum’s
industrial history, when the metal displaced copper for high-voltage
transmission lines. But aluminum conductors proved much more
trouble-prone than copper wires, especially in electrical connec-
tions. Technical skill and innovation solved these problems in high-
voltage conductors, but not in aluminum household wiring, which
became common in the late 1960s. Aluminum household wiring was
one of the great consumer safety debacles of the 1970s, confirming
the perception of aluminum as ersatz in this context.
In their first few years of producing electrolytic aluminum, the
managers of the Pittsburgh Reduction Company (PRC), Alcoa’s pre-
decessor, recognized that promotion of new uses was the key to suc-
cess. This task was not easy, because “almost every demand for alu-
minum had to be won in contest with well-established metals of
which the qualities and suitabilities for specified purposes were well
known.” Although domestic goods like cookware provided impor-
tant early markets, the PRC also sought large-scale industrial applica-
tions. One of the first such applications occurred in the steel indus-
try, which used small quantities of aluminum as a deoxidizing agent
to improve castings.63
Proponents of aluminum had hopes for industrial applications
far beyond its use as a chemical agent in steelmaking. The almost
magical qualities of the light metal supposedly made it suitable for a
wide variety of structures and machines. Its first large-scale indus-
trial application—the use of aluminum for electric power transmis-
sion lines—was driven not by technical advantages, however, but by
price.
In 1895 Alfred E. Hunt, president of the PRC, recognized alumi-
num’s potential to compete with copper on cost. Aluminum’s con-
ductivity is only 63 percent of that of copper, but aluminum weighs
one-third as much. For equal current-carrying capacity, noted Hunt,
63. Wallace, Market Control, 10. On the history of aluminum cookware, see
Penny Sparke, “Cookware to Cocktail Shakers: The Domestication of Aluminum
in the United States, 1900–1939,” in Aluminum by Design, ed. Nichols, 112–39.
250 SCHATZBERG
aluminum would become competitive when its price per pound fell
to less than twice that of copper.64
The rise of long-distance alternating current power transmission
in the 1890s rapidly expanded the market for electrical cable. In
1898 the PRC launched a determined campaign to market aluminum
conductors to electric utilities, and by the end of the year the com-
pany had orders for over one million pounds of aluminum wire. In
fiscal year 1900 the company sold some 2.1 million pounds of wire,
which amounted to 47 percent of the firm’s total sales.65
The stunning success of the new material is revealing. In 1898
aluminum was a largely untested material for electrical conductors;
there was no information on the long-term durability of wires and
joints. Although its lighter weight offered some advantages, alumi-
num wire’s larger diameter and lower strength were potential prob-
lems, especially under real-life conditions of icing and wind. Even
though the PRC sold wire at a discount compared to aluminum ingot,
the price advantage over copper was relatively small, especially con-
sidering the unknowns faced by electric utilities that adopted the
new material. Undoubtedly the early adopters of aluminum conduc-
tors were motivated primarily by anticipated cost savings; yet, given
the uncertainty surrounding the new technology, these large orders
also suggest the faith of the electrical industry in the future of alumi-
num, an indication of the power of symbolic meanings.
The practical problems of aluminum transmission lines posed a
severe challenge to the industry’s faith. Margaret Graham and Bettye
Pruitt, official historians of Alcoa R&D, observed that, “once installed
in the field, the solid-aluminum wire betrayed some highly dysfunc-
tional characteristics.” Alcoa had to provide the utilities with con-
siderable technical support in the use of aluminum cables. “If they
handled it like copper we were dead,” remembered one Alcoa chief
executive. Aluminum cable remained problematic until 1907, when
William Hoopes, Alcoa’s electrical engineer, found a solution by
64. C. C. Connor, “Electrical Conductor History,” c. 1959, Alcoa Marketing

and Sales, Subseries II-Electrical Conductors—History—1959, box 4, folder 4,
Alcoa Records, HSWP; F. R. Dallye to S. K. Colby, 13 May 1938; Elihu Thomson
to Alfred E. Hunt, 7 Feb. 1898; Charles F. Scott, “Comparison of Copper and Alu-
minum for Power Transmission Circuits,” 8 June 1898, Alcoa Marketing and
Sales, Subseries II— Electrical Conductors—Correspondence, ibid.
65. Wallace, Market Control, 14–15; Graham and Pruitt, R&D for Industry, 76.
The wire sales figure is from H. C. Peffer to Arthur V. Davis, 1 Nov. 1900, Alcoa
Marketing and Sales, Subseries II—Electrical Conductors—Correspondence,
Alcoa Records, HSWP. The total sales figure is from Smith, From Monopoly to
Competition, 88. On long distance power transmission see Thomas P. Hughes,
Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore,
Md., 1983).
twisting aluminum wires around a steel core. This combination,

called ACSR (for “aluminum cable steel reinforced”), proved suc-
cessful in field installations in 1909. After the First World War,
ACSR gradually overtook copper in high-voltage transmission lines;
by the mid-1950s more than three million miles of ACSR had been
installed in the United States alone.66
Copper continued to dominate insulated conductors through
World War II, largely because insulated aluminum wire remained
more expensive than copper in gauges typical of household wiring.
In the 1950s, however, the price differential shifted in favor of alumi-
num, and the American aluminum industry renewed its drive to
capture more of the electrical market from copper. Aluminum con-
ductors gradually displaced copper in more and more applications,
including transformer windings, distribution lines, and even electri-
cal service connections between utility lines and residential build-
ings.67
Problems with connections limited the widespread adoption of
insulated aluminum wiring, however, especially in residences. Alu-
minum electrical connections suffer from four disadvantages com-
pared to copper. Most important is the nonconductive oxide film that
forms almost immediately on exposed aluminum. Second, alumi-
num’s coefficient of thermal expansion is higher than copper’s, mak-
ing aluminum-to-copper connections likely to loosen over time.
Third, aluminum-to-copper connections face the problem of electro-
lytic action: in the presence of moisture, an aluminum-copper junc-
tion will act like a small battery, with the aluminum conductor grad-
ually eroding. Finally, there is the tendency of aluminum to “creep”
under pressure, potentially producing a loose joint.68
These problems were well known in the 1950s, but electrical engi-
neers insisted that they could be solved with proper care. Reliable
aluminum connections required trained personnel and strict proce-
66. Smith, From Monopoly to Competition, 88–91; Graham and Pruitt, R&D
for Industry, 76–90.
67. H. W. Biskeborn, “A Historical Review of Aluminum Applications in In-
sulated Conductors,” in Symposium on the Use of Aluminum for Insulated Con-
ductors: Ten Conference Papers Presented at the 1952 AIEE Fall General Meeting
and the 1953 Winter General Meeting (New York, 1953), 6–13; Edward E.
McIlveen, “Insulated Aluminum Cables in Industrial and Utility Applications,”
in ibid., 35; “Aluminum Takes on New Job,” Business Week (1 Oct. 1955), 140;
“Aluminum Wire,” Business Week (28 April 1956), 182. For relative prices, see
Brubaker, Trends, 61.
68. Martin D. Bergan, “Low-Voltage Splicing and Terminating—Industrial
and Commercial Buildings,” in Jointing, Splicing, and Terminating Copper and
Aluminum Conductors: Eight Papers Presented in a Special Study Group, Spring
1956 (New York, 1957), 18–21; E. G. Sturdevant, “Insulated Aluminum Conduc-
tors,” in Symposium on the Use of Aluminum for Insulated Conductors, 26.
252 SCHATZBERG
dures. In 1957 electrical engineer Martin Bergan, an expert on alumi-

num connectors, cautioned his fellow electrical engineers not “to make
aluminum connections as one would copper connections.” Accord-
ing to Bergan, “almost all the difficulties with aluminum arise be-
cause someone tries to connect it as he would copper, instead of
in the special way that aluminum requires.” Other electrical experts
echoed Bergan’s concerns.69
The need for special connectors posed a barrier to the widespread
use of aluminum in homes and commercial buildings, since the ad-
ditional cost of the connections could easily outweigh the savings in
wire.70 Wire manufacturers “solved” this problem not by developing
safe and reliable connectors for home use, but by claiming that alu-
minum wiring could indeed be treated just like copper. In 1946 the
Underwriters Laboratory (UL) approved insulated aluminum con-
ductors for domestic use but placed no special requirements on alu-
minum connections. In a 1958 letter to Kaiser Aluminum, one of the
most aggressive manufacturers of aluminum wire, the UL reiterated
its opinion that “copper and aluminum wires could be used inter-
changeably with the general line of wiring devices” with the excep-
tion of the screwless push-in connector used in some switches and
receptacles.71 In other words, the chief American standards-setting
body for domestic electrical devices approved the use of aluminum
wire in a manner that directly contradicted the advice of leading alu-
minum experts.
Nevertheless, little aluminum wiring was used in residential con-
struction before 1965. Beginning in 1966, however, the aluminum
industry and cable manufacturers began aggressively marketing alu-
minum wiring for houses, largely in response to the rising price of
copper. Production of aluminum cable in common residential sizes
increased to 23 million meters in 1966, compared to an annual aver-
age of less than 4 million meters for the first six years of the decade.
From 1966 through 1971, production of aluminum cable increased
to roughly 123 million meters a year. Crude estimates put the total
69. Bergan, “Low-Voltage Splicing,” 19, 21; see also McIlveen, “Insulated Alu-
minum Cables,” 41–42.
70. Jacob Rabinow, Some Thoughts on Electrical Connections, NBSIR 78–
1507 (Washington, D.C., 1978), reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Com-
mittee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Hearings: Hazard Posed by “Old
Technology” Aluminum Wiring Systems, 95th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.,
1978), 234 [hereafter, Commerce Committee, Hazard Hearings].
71. Sturdevant, “Insulated Aluminum Conductors”; UL letter reprinted in
Commerce Committee, Hazard Hearings, 205.
number of American houses with aluminum wiring in 1971 between

1.5 and 2 million.72
There appears to have been little effort by the wire manufacturers
to educate electricians or to warn homeowners of the special care
required for aluminum connections. Not surprisingly, serious prob-
lems began to appear as the number of aluminum-wired homes in-
creased. By 1968 the UL began receiving reports of problems with
aluminum household wiring, including house fires. Overheated re-
ceptacles sometimes burst into flames, even when no appliances
were connected. The source of the problem was no secret: the same
characteristics of aluminum connections discussed by experts in the
1950s and earlier. Differential thermal cycling, creep, and mechani-
cal vibration all permitted small amounts of air to pass between the
contact surfaces of aluminum wires, thus allowing a buildup of insu-
lating oxide. The oxide increased the resistance of the connection,
raising its temperature and worsening thermal cycling. Many resi-
dents of aluminum-wired houses reported light switches and outlets
that seemed perpetually warm to the touch. These problems in-
creased with time; circuits that worked perfectly when new gradu-
ally degraded.73
The UL and wire manufacturers, however, continued to proclaim
the safety of aluminum wire, despite mounting evidence of a serious
fire hazard. By 1970 an increasing number of engineers, fire inspec-
tors, and other technical personnel had concluded that aluminum
household wire was unsafe. Carl L. Duncan, chief safety officer of
the Huntington Beach (California) Fire Department, carried “bushel
baskets of burned out receptacles to the Underwriters’ Laboratories”
and discussed the problem at length with UL engineers. Despite clear
evidence of a mounting crisis, the UL refused to act. In a meeting
with wire manufacturers in late 1970, Andrew Farquwar, director of
engineering at the UL, reported that he “found himself in the awk-
ward situation of having to defend aluminum building wire while
witnessing all kinds of burn-out [sic] wiring devices of aluminum.”74
In July 1971 the UL implicitly admitted its error in approving alu-
minum wire by issuing new standards for aluminum wire and de-
vices—standards met by no existing products. Because UL listing
was required by many local electrical codes, residential aluminum
72. Elaine D. Bunten, John L. Donaldson, and Eugene C. McDowell, Hazard

Assessment of Aluminum Electrical Wiring in Residential Use, NBSIR 75–677
(Washington, D.C., 1974), 3, 33, 36–37.
73. Various witnesses in Commerce Committee, Hazard Hearings, detail the
problems. See esp. testimony by fire investigator Carl L. Duncan, 56–68, and Na-
tional Bureau of Standards researcher Jacob Rabinow, 196–260.
74. Commerce Committee, Hazard Hearings, 52, 56.
254 SCHATZBERG
wiring was in effect temporarily banned. New aluminum alloy wires

were approved about a year later, but aluminum household wiring
never regained its earlier popularity. Meanwhile, the UL and the
aluminum industry refused to accept responsibility for allowing a
dangerous technology into millions of homes. During Congressional
hearings in 1978, an investigator for the committee reported, “we
have been informed by industry and UL that all of the problems at-
tributed to aluminum wire connections are due to poor workman-
ship.”75 In contrast, a careful study the following year estimated the
risk of fire as fifty-five times greater in aluminum- than in copper-
wired houses.76
In 1974 the recently created Consumer Product Safety Commis-
sion (CPSC) began investigating the hazards of aluminum wiring and
alerting homeowners to the potential dangers. In October 1977 the
CPSC filed suit against twenty-six aluminum wire and device manu-
facturers, seeking to have the “old technology” aluminum wiring de-
clared an “imminently hazardous consumer product,” which would
have made it subject to immediate recall. Such a recall could have
cost wire and device manufacturers up to $500 million. The manu-
facturers bitterly fought the CPSC in complex litigation, disputing
the CPSC’s jurisdiction over aluminum household wiring. The com-
mission lost on this issue in the D.C. Circuit Court, which ruled that
aluminum building wire was not a consumer product under the Con-
sumer Product Safety Act.77 The CPSC abandoned its attempt to regu-
late aluminum wiring, leaving homeowners, not manufacturers, to
bear the cost of repairing the dangerous connections.
The history of aluminum electrical wiring shows that the material
consequences of a new technology can shape symbolic meanings,
just as meanings can shape technological choice. From the late nine-
teenth century, electrical engineers perceived aluminum as a prob-
lematic substitute for copper, attractive only for its price. Although
the engineers likely were also motivated by their belief in the moder-
75. Commerce Committee, Hazard Hearings, 211; “Aluminum Battles a ‘Haz-

ard’ Label,” Business Week (Aug. 25, 1975), 26. For a popular account echoing
the industry’s claim of faulty workmanship, see G. Daniels, “Controversy over
Aluminum Wiring,” Popular Science 208 (May 1976): 56ff.
76. “The Trouble with Aluminum Wiring,” Consumer Reports 56 (Jan. 1981):
42–43; U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Repairing Aluminum Wiring
(Washington, D.C., 1998); Franklin Research Center, National Controlled Study of
Relative Risk of Overheating of Aluminum Compared to Copper Wired Electrical
Receptacles in Homes and Laboratory (Philadelphia, Pa., 1979).
77. “Aluminum Battles a ‘Hazard’ Label,” 26. A timeline of CPSC actions and
the CPSC’s complaint are included in Commerce Committee, Hazard Hearings,
74–76, 332–408. For a summary of the litigation, see Consumer Prod. Safety
Comm’n v. The Anaconda Co., 593 F.2d 1314 (D.C. Cir. 1979).
nity of aluminum—a belief that would help explain the Pittsburgh

Reduction Company’s rapid initial success in selling an untested
material to electric utilities around 1900—enthusiasm for aluminum
is not necessary to explain the growth of the electrical conductor
market.
The fiasco of aluminum household wiring is somewhat more dif-
ficult to explain. Perhaps shortsighted profit seeking is a sufficient
explanation—though minimal foresight would have suggested that
burning down customers’ homes was unlikely to boost sales. Con-
sumer protections were clearly inadequate before the 1970s, but such
egregious blindness to potential hazards suggests some additional
cause for the adoption of aluminum household wiring. Access to the
UL archives would be needed to discover why the organization ap-
proved aluminum household wiring without adequate testing, but
one can safety assume that the decision was based on information
provided by aluminum wire manufacturers. In 1953 Alcoa president
Wilson treated a conference of aluminum conductor experts to a din-
ner speech in which he served up a paean to progress made possible
by the wider use of aluminum wiring.78 Perhaps the assembled ex-
perts paid little attention to Wilson’s exhortations, but similar rheto-
ric pervaded the technical community and may well have dulled ap-
prehensions, at least among the industry’s managers, to the dangers
of household aluminum wiring.79
The hazards of aluminum household wiring provided the material
context for a political struggle over meaning, as the symbolism of
aluminum wire became transformed through congressional hearings
and press reports. In the end, aluminum household wiring was marked
symbolically as ersatz, a cheap—and in this case dangerous—substi-
tute. This symbolism has effectively closed aluminum out of the
market for household wiring, although the aluminum industry in-
sists that the new wire alloys are safe for residential use. Even if
those safety claims are correct, the market for aluminum household
wiring will remain limited. In a sense, the symbolism of aluminum
wiring has proved more durable than its material properties.80
78. Wilson, “Man’s Distinctive Work,” 2–4.

79. For an example of this enthusiasm at the end of World War II, see “The
Aluminum Shape of Things to Come in the Electrical Industry,” Aluminum News
Letter (June 1944), 4–5.
80. For a defense of aluminum wiring, see Ravindra H. Ganatra and Thomas
L. McKoon, “Reliability of Connections: A Comparison of Aluminum Alloy
Stranded Conductors and Electrically Equivalent Copper Conductors,” Wire Jour-
nal International 31 (July 1998): 112–23. Some experts continue to criticize the
safety of aluminum wiring; see J. Aronstein, “Failure of Aluminum Connections
in Residential Applications,” in Electrical Contacts—1991, Proceedings of the
Thirty-Seventh IEEE Holm Conference on Electrical Contacts (Chicago, 1991),
256 SCHATZBERG
Aluminum Ambiguities: Automobiles
Aluminum has repeatedly seemed poised to become a major rival to

steel in automobile construction, but never more so than at the be-
ginning of the twenty-first century. From 1977 to 2002, the average
amount of aluminum in American cars almost tripled, from 97 to
268 pounds. Even with this growth, aluminum accounted for only
6.5 percent of the average American car and light truck in 2001, and
most of that aluminum went into the drive train, radiators, and
wheels. Despite the considerable attention given to a few aluminum-
bodied vehicles, only about 5 pounds of aluminum were used in the
average auto body in 1999.81 Even as the aluminum industry praises
the advantages of aluminum in automobiles, other observers insist
that the light metal will have a very difficult time dislodging steel.
The struggle between aluminum and steel provides a clear exam-
ple of the interaction between symbolic meanings and technical cri-
teria. Automobiles are among the most intensively engineered con-
sumer products ever produced, yet tremendous uncertainty remains
about which materials will be best for automobiles in the near future.
Concerns over global warming have already led to demands for
lighter, more fuel-efficient automobiles. Long-term changes in fuel
prices could fundamentally alter cost calculations. In the context of
technological uncertainty, culturally conditioned expectations can
play a decisive role in shaping the direction of industrial R&D. For
automobile materials, the politics of meaning is a serious matter.
The recent resurgence in automotive aluminum represents a re-
versal of aluminum’s fortunes before World War II. The automobile
industry became one of the first large industrial users of aluminum
in the early twentieth century. Advocates of aluminum had long
praised its weight advantages in transportation. These economies re-
271–77. For continued consumer anxiety about aluminum household wiring, see
Bruce Hansberger, “Fixit: Aluminum Wiring Used in Some Houses Is Hazardous,”
Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 5 Dec. 2001, E11. Copper trade associations continue
to portray copper wire as safer than aluminum. See The Color of Trust: A Compar-
ison of Copper versus Aluminum Electrical Wire and Cable, Publication No. 33E
(Don Mills, Ontario: Canadian Copper and Brass Development Association, 1997),
URL: http://www.ccbda.org/pdfs/33e.pdf.
81. Al Wrigley, “Steel Use in Autos Seen Declining,” American Metal Market
107 (1 March 1999): 8; Al Wrigley, “Aluminum Revs Up for More Automotive
Industry Gains,” ibid. 109 (31 July 2001): 1; Drew Winter, “War of Words Heats
Up,” Ward’s Auto World 35 (Oct. 1999): 81. I calculated the 6.5 percent figure
from Wrigley’s estimate of 255 pounds of aluminum in the average American car
in 2001, and the EPA-estimated average vehicle weight in 2001 of 3,909 pounds.
For this latter figure, see Harry Stoffer, “Weight Gain Makes Vehicles Thirsty,”
Automotive News 77 (14 Oct. 2002): 4.
mained elusive before the development of high-strength wrought

alloys after World War I, but aluminum castings did provide weight
savings in lightly stressed components like crankcases, gear hous-
ings, and oil pans. By 1914 80 percent of American automobiles used
such castings. In the early 1920s the automobile industry was con-
suming well over half of American primary and secondary alumi-
num production.82
Aluminum’s automotive prospects could hardly have seemed
brighter in the early 1920s. Just as in aviation, a battle between wood
and metal was raging over the design of automobile bodies; even the
Ford Model T body used a considerable amount of wood. The alumi-
num industry and innovative designers dreamed of aluminum-inten-
sive cars. Smaller manufacturers like Pierce-Arrow had been produc-
ing aluminum-bodied automobiles since before World War I. After
the war the new precipitation-hardened alloys promised further
weight savings and performance enhancements. In 1919 Alcoa hired
English automobile engineer L. H. Pomeroy to design an aluminum
car; Pomeroy spent seven years on the project and produced several
vehicles with aluminum engines, frames, and bodies. Basing his rea-
soning on that work, Alcoa metallurgist Zay Jeffries claimed that an
aluminum automobile could be made 1,000 pounds lighter than a
conventional vehicle with a net increase in cost of only $100.83
Yet aluminum’s post–World War I position was not secure, de-
spite expectations for the coming aluminum age. In 1919 the average
American automobile used less than 30 pounds of aluminum, a fig-
ure that declined significantly throughout the decade as mass pro-
duction matured and price competition intensified. Mass production
dramatically reduced the ratio of labor to materials costs, making it
harder to justify higher-priced aluminum. Furthermore, steel proved
better suited to mass production than aluminum, especially for tech-
niques like die forming and spot welding. By the beginning of the
Depression, sheet steel had almost completely replaced aluminum in
auto bodies and oil pans, and cast iron had replaced aluminum in
most crankcases. Automotive demand for aluminum would have col-
lapsed entirely if not for the development of aluminum pistons and
connecting rods, applications where low mass and good heat con-
82. Wallace, Market Control, 19–20, 60–61.

83. Wisehart, “The Wonder Story of Aluminum,” 142; “The Aluminum Age,”
7G; M. Rollason, “Increasing Use of Alloyed Aluminum as an Engineering Mate-
rial,” Industrial Management 59 (May, June 1920): 387, 458–59; Zay Jeffries,
“Light Metals in the Automotive Industry,” in Symposium on Developments in
Automotive Materials (Philadelphia, Pa., 1930), 73–74; Graham and Pruitt, R&D
for Industry, 106.
258 SCHATZBERG
ductivity more than made up for increased costs. By the early 1930s
less than 15 percent of American aluminum was consumed by the
automobile industry.84
After World War II aluminum once again seemed poised to make
major inroads into the automobile industry. Yet, except for an in-
crease in decorative use, the proportion of automotive aluminum
changed little before the petroleum crises of the 1970s. Growth in
the use of plastics far outpaced that of aluminum; from 1970 to 2002,
American automobiles contained more plastic than aluminum. The
spike in fuel prices in the 1970s fundamentally changed the nature
of competition among automotive materials. The weight of the aver-
age American car fell by half a ton from 1975 to 1985. Almost all of
the weight shed was iron and steel. The percentage of aluminum
doubled, from 2 percent to more than 4 percent.85
These changed conditions revived faith in the transformative
power of aluminum, adding environmental benefits to aluminum’s
cultural significance. With environmental arguments in hand, advo-
cates of aluminum sought to do more than replace cast iron in en-
gines and gearboxes. They took aim at the main prize, replacing steel
in automobile bodies, predicting that aluminum bodies would weigh
40 percent less than steel bodies. Since the 1970s auto manufacturers
and aluminum companies have spent huge sums to turn this predic-
tion into reality. Alcoa worked for over a decade helping Audi de-
velop an aluminum body for its luxury A8 model, spending some
$250 million on the project, including construction of a $70 million
factory in Germany to produce the necessary components. In the late
1990s Ford spent between $40 and $50 million to research high-
volume production of aluminum body parts. Chrysler and Alcoa col-
laborated to design the aluminum-bodied Prowler, a specialty car
aimed at niche markets. In late 1999 Audi launched the first alumi-
num-intensive automobile in high-volume production, the A2.86 Ford
in turn announced plans to build aluminum bodies for its new Jaguar
XJ model, using an airplane-type monocoque construction rather
84. Wallace, Market Control, 61–62; Graham and Pruitt, R&D for Industry,
148–49; Jeffries, “Light Metals in the Automotive Industry,” 72–73, 75–77.
85. “Aluminum Woos Auto Industry,” Business Week (23 March 1956), 73–
76; J. Weinberg, K. L. Harris, and G. White, Steel in Motor Vehicles—A 35-Year
Perspective, Information Circular 9175 (Washington, D.C., 1987).
86. Steven Ashley, “Aluminum Vehicle Breaks New Ground,” Mechanical En-
gineering 116 (Feb. 1994): 50–51; Stuart Birch, “Aluminum Space Frame Tech-
nology,” Automotive Engineering 102 (Jan. 1994): 70–73; John P. Cortez, “Moving
into the Mainstream,” Autoweek (16 May 1994), 21; Myra Pinkham, “Aluminum
Makes Inroads in Automotive Market,” American Metal Market, Automotive Alu-
minum Supplement (23 March 1999), 9A; Edmund Chew, “Audi Touts Alumi-
num in New A2,” Automotive News 74 (20 Dec. 1999): 36B.
than a space frame like the Audis. With plans to build up to forty
thousand XJs annually, Ford hopes to use the Jaguar to perfect meth-
ods for mass producing aluminum auto bodies.87
These aluminum-intensive vehicles (especially the Audis) gener-
ated considerable enthusiasm, linking aluminum not only to moder-
nity but also to environmental responsibility. Reviews of the Audi
A8 repeatedly praised its “space-age technology” and its “revolu-
tionary” design.88 Audi strongly promoted the symbolism of alumi-
num in its advertisements for the A8, an approach that one trade
journalist described as an “unusual strategy of trying to focus con-
sumer awareness on the material rather than on the brand.” Audi’s
first European television advertisement for the A8 was a classic re-
prise of early enthusiasm for aluminum, taking the viewer through
the stone, bronze, and iron ages up to the present “age of aluminum.”
There was no apparent irony in the use of century-old rhetoric to
make the case for aluminum’s modernity. A subsequent advertise-
ment featured a stock market guru who suggested investing in alumi-
num, while a third linked the A8 with the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration’s aluminum Mooncar.89 One observer tried to
make a case for the A8’s environmental friendliness, noting that 87
percent of its aluminum body could be recycled. If it was hard to
sell environmentalists on a two-ton luxury car, linking aluminum to
environmentalism was much easier for the fuel-sparing A2, with its
“environmentally friendly all-aluminum body.”90 Audi launched an
innovative campaign for the A2 in Britain, using advertising posters
and billboards printed on aluminum sheet, with the tag line “Lighter
on metal, lighter on fuel.”91
Yet, for all the apparent progress, aluminum faces major obstacles,
both technical and cultural, as an automobile material. Aluminum
bodies still cost considerably more to build than steel bodies, al-
though better fuel economy may compensate owners for higher
prices. Moreover, even if dramatically higher fuel prices make con-
sumers clamor for aluminum vehicles, there is not enough alumi-
num to supply the conversion. American manufacturers produced
87. James Mackintosh, “Ford’s Luxury Cars May Be Built in Aluminium,” Fi-
nancial Times (14 Sept. 2002), 3.
88. Stephen Baker and David Woodruff, “Alcoa Wants to Take Its Show on
the Road,” Business Week (1 Aug. 1994), 58; Cortez, “Moving into the Main-
stream,” 21; Zal S. Gander, “The Unbelievable Lightness of Being,” Asiaweek (11
Feb. 2000), ad. sect. 34.
89. Christian Kohl, “Audi Spotlights the ‘Age of Aluminum,’” American
Metal Market 109 (27 Dec. 2001): 249.
90. Chew, “Audi Touts Aluminum in New A2,” 36B.
91. John Tylee, “Audi Promotes A2 with Aluminium Poster,” Campaign
(U.K.) (4 May 2001), 6.
260 SCHATZBERG
some seventeen million cars and light trucks in 1999. Replacing all
the iron and steel in those vehicles with aluminum, even assuming
a 40 percent weight reduction, would increase American aluminum
consumption by 133 percent.92
Furthermore, the shift to mass-produced aluminum bodies has
been difficult for early adopters like Audi. Until 2002 the Audi A8
was largely “hand-built” in numbers small for the auto industry;
only about 12,000 A8s were made in 2001. The A2 production pro-
cess, in contrast, uses robots extensively to give Audi an annual ca-
pacity of 60,000 units. When Audi launched the A2 in 2000, it expe-
rienced serious quality control problems with the aluminum body
that kept production 10 percent below the planned rate of 300 vehi-
cles a day. Production has gone more smoothly in the last two years,
but consumers have shown less enthusiasm for aluminum cars than
has Audi’s top management. Sales fell short of the 60,000-unit target
in 2001, and continued slow sales have prompted Audi to reduce
the 2002 target to 44,000 units. Manufacturing problems have also
plagued the aluminum body of the Jaguar’s new XJ sedan, delaying
its introduction and causing a projected 2002 operating loss for Jag-
uar of almost $500 million.93
Such problems can be expected in markets with increasing re-
turns. Steel is clearly “locked-in” for automobile bodies and has a
huge advantage over aluminum resulting from economies of scale
and almost a century of accumulated production experience. The
A2’s aluminum body still costs twice as much as a steel body, de-
spite huge expenditures by both Audi and Alcoa on aluminum man-
ufacturing technologies. Yet twice the cost is close to being competi-
tive, given the real benefit of significant weight savings, estimated at
43 percent of a traditional steel body. As Audi moves down the
learning curve, sustained by its enthusiasm for aluminum, the A2
body will surely become less expensive. The steel industry has rea-
92. Jeff R. Dieffenbach and Anthony E. Mascarin, “Body-in-White Material

System: A Life-Cycle Cost Comparison,” JOM: The Member Journal of the Miner-
als, Metals, and Materials Society 47 (June 1993): 16–19. The 133 percent figure
is calculated from Al Wrigley, “Metals Still Ride High in Drive for Lighter Autos,”
American Metal Market 108 (28 Feb. 2000): 6; U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral
Commodity Summaries, 2000; Jim Henry, “Century Closes on a High: 16,958,267,”
Automotive News 74 (10 Jan. 2000): 1.
93. Wim Oude Weernink, “A2 Lessons Will Trim Costs of Audi A8,” Automo-
tive News Europe 7 (17 June 2002): 26; Gunter Hoffmeister and Dorothee Ostle,
“Aluminum-Bodied Audi A2 Hit Hard by Quality Problems,” Automotive News
75 (4 Dec. 2000): 28EE; “Audi Cuts Targets,” Automotive News Europe 7 (6 May
2002): 16; Bradford Wernle, “Aluminum Is a Key Reason for Jaguar’s Big Losses,”
ibid. (7 Oct. 2002): 3.
son to be worried about aluminum auto bodies, and about the A2 in

particular.94
Until the mid-1990s the steel industry did little to respond to
competition from aluminum in automobiles. For obvious reasons,
steel makers have not invested heavily in finding ways to use less
steel, but the threat from aluminum eventually spurred the industry
into action. In 1994 an international consortium of steel producers
established the Ultra Light Steel Auto Body project (ULSAB) to cut
25 percent from the weight of standard steel bodies. Funded at a
modest $22 million, the group took only four years to reach its goals,
primarily by using high-strength steels and innovative metal-forming
techniques. The resulting design achieved the target weight reduc-
tion while substantially increasing the strength of the vehicle. Most
remarkably, cost studies showed that the ULSAB would be cheaper
to produce than a standard steel body. One aluminum-industry jour-
nal described the results as a possible “fatal blow for aluminium’s
autobody aspirations.”95
The steel industry is using the ULSAB results to contest not only
the technical advantages of aluminum, but also its symbolic meaning
as environmentally friendly. Advocates of aluminum automobiles
point out that reduced weight translates into lower emissions of car-
bon dioxide (CO2) and conclude therefore that automotive aluminum
contributes to the fight against global warming. The American Iron
and Steel Institute (AISI) contested that claim, commissioning a
study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Material Systems
Laboratory to calculate the total CO2 impact of aluminum-intensive
vehicles. The study found that it would take thirty-five years for a
fleet of aluminum vehicles to produce a net reduction in CO2 emis-
sions compared to emissions from a ULSAB-equipped fleet, which is
statistically equivalent to no reduction at all. The Aluminum Associ-
ation in turn denounced the AISI study, labeling its assumptions “to-
tally off base.” The bitter public wrangling over academic studies
might seem misplaced, since the dispute has had no apparent bear-
ing on government policy or consumer demand. Yet the debate is a
crucial part of symbolic politics, because the material that succeeds
94. “Cars of the Future Will Be Made of . . . Steel,” Purchasing 130 (8 Feb.
2001): 32B1.
95. Ken Low, “Sweetness and Light—The Ultralight Steel Auto Body Project,”
Steel Times 226 (Sept. 1998): 332–33; Raoul Witherall, “The End of the Road for
Aluminium Autobodies?” Aluminium Today 10 (March 1998): 28. For continued
work by the consortium, see Brian Corbett, “Seeing Stars—and Dollars,” Ward’s
Automotive Age 38 (Feb. 2002): 49; “Cars of the Future Will Be Made of . . . Steel,”
32B1.
262 SCHATZBERG
in painting itself “green” is likely to receive more long-term R&D

funding from the automobile industry.96
The symbolic association of aluminum with modernity remains
strong, as demonstrated by the enthusiastic reaction of the trade
press to the aluminum A8 and A2. Yet Audi’s commitment to alumi-
num seems hard to justify in economic terms. Production costs of
the A8 and A2 are significantly higher because of their aluminum
bodies. The A2 in particular is priced considerably higher than other
“superminis” in the European market with similar gas mileage,
which, according to one British reviewer, “is perhaps one reason
why not many of them are seen on the road.”97 In other words, after
spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop mass-produced
aluminum auto bodies, all Audi has to show are two costly cars
whose aluminum structures offer at best marginal technical ad-
vantages. Even assuming that Audi does eventually succeed in re-
ducing the disadvantage of aluminum in manufacturing costs, the
improved techniques will probably diffuse throughout the industry
before Audi has a chance to collect any technological rents. In addi-
tion, by that time aluminum auto bodies will face competition from
carbon-fiber composites, which promise even greater weight savings
than aluminum.98 Audi’s achievements with aluminum are indeed
impressive, perhaps heroic. Yet the company’s strategy hardly seems
a model of rational economic action, given the tremendous uncer-
tainties regarding fuel costs, competing materials, government poli-
cies, and the technical challenge of mass-producing aluminum auto-
mobiles.
Finally, there is some evidence that consumers are resisting the
high-tech symbolism of the aluminum automobile. As observers in
the trade press have pointed out, aluminum is linked to technologies
that are not so comfortably high-tech, such as beer cans, cheap
cookware, and problematic wiring. Remarked one sales manager at a
Connecticut Audi dealership, “When people think of aluminum,
96. Aaron Robinson, “Heavy Metal Fights Rival Lightweight,” Automotive

News 73 (14 June 1999): 16; Winter, “War of Words Heats Up,” 81; “Cars of the
Future Will Be Made of . . . Steel,” 32B1; Brian Corbett, “Aluminum Answers
Steel Study,” Ward’s Auto World 36 (Aug. 2000): 63. See also the industry Web
sites, http://www.autosteel.org and http://www.autoaluminum.org.
97. “Car Review: Stuart Bladon Assesses Six Contenders from the Battle for
Best Small Family Hatchback,” in Gear Wheels: The Online Motoring Magazine
(Autumn 2002), URL: http://www.gearwheelsmag.co.uk/features/carreview.htm.
98. BMW is planning to introduce a carbon-fiber body automobile in 2005.
See William Diem et al., “BMW Races into Carbon Fiber,” Ward’s Auto World 38
(Sept. 2002): 9.
they think of a beer can; . . . they don’t think of an airplane.”99 Famil-

iarity can breed contempt; aluminum by its very success in mundane
applications has helped to undermine its symbolism as the metal of
the future.
Conclusion
My account of the symbolic meanings of aluminum as an industrial

material supplements rather than supplants the existing historiogra-
phy. Symbolic meanings alone do not make aluminum airplanes
lighter, aluminum connections reliable, or aluminum auto bodies af-
fordable. Nevertheless, symbolic meanings do play a role in techno-
logical innovation by shaping expectations, which, in the context of
uncertainty, encourage innovation along particular paths. The con-
nection between symbolic meanings and innovation provides one
way to bring culture into business history.
Symbolic meanings are not, however, simply given by the logic of
a cultural system. Instead, symbolic meanings function as a set of
possibilities whose precise content is worked out by historical actors
in specific contexts. Representatives of competing innovations un-
derstand this interpretative process and therefore engage in a politics
of symbols, seeking to shape meanings in ways most favorable to
their preferred technological path. This local politics of meaning is
in turn shaped by the material effects of technology as refracted
through the experience of users and made visible through scientific
research, as demonstrated by the case of aluminum household
wiring.
The history of aluminum would therefore be incomplete without
attention to the mutual shaping of material practices and symbolic
meanings, along with the active struggles of historical actors to con-
trol this process. By influencing technological expectations, struggles
to shape the cultural meanings of aluminum have real consequences
for the future. Although aluminum’s fate as an industrial material
ultimately rests on its technical characteristics, those characteristics
are given only in part by nature; they also depend on culturally
shaped human actions.
99. Tara Weingarten and Daniel McGinn, “More Than Beer Cans on Wheels,”
Newsweek 129 (9 June 1997): 54–55. See also Cortez, “Moving into the Main-
stream,” 21; Gander, “The Unbelievable Lightness of Being,” ad. sect. 34.
264 SCHATZBERG
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Symbolic Culture and Technological Change: The Cultural History of

Enterprise and Society / Volume 4 / Issue 02 / June 2003, pp 226 - 271

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The history of aluminum illustrates how the concept of symbolic

From its ﬁrst commercial production by Henri Deville in 1858, alu-

remains the “metal of the future,” still overshadowed by steel, wood,

1. See George David Smith, From Monopoly to Competition: The Transforma-

their actions. Cultural analysis has already begun to “reshape” the

3. Kenneth Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Business

imperatives of neoclassical economics or the material base of Marxist

10. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976).

they always draw on the systems of symbolic meaning in which

14. This somewhat cryptic comment is loosely based on Gadamer’s analysis

One powerful type of expectation is technological enthusiasm,

and Structures: Rethinking Historical Alternatives to Mass Productions,” in World

the same symbolic meaning as aluminum in airplanes. Furthermore,

Aluminum: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm

By inﬂuencing technological expectations, the symbolic meanings of

22. Robert Friedel, “A New Metal! Aluminum in Its 19th-Century Context,”

Key to this faith in aluminum’s future was the metal’s symbolic

of a new technology, and unfulﬁlled expectations are then trans-

Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, ed. James W. Carey

32. M. A. Ditte, “Sur les propriétés de l’aluminium,” Comptes Rendus de

“accomplished more advertising in two years for this industry than

is nourished exclusively by our national substance.”38 In Germany

38. Charles Grard, “Le siècle de l’aluminium,” Revue Scientiﬁque 65 (1927):

tions for aluminum’s future. A detailed wartime survey by Business

41. “The Light Metals: A Wartime Reconnaissance of Their Postwar Position,”

material of unlimited versatility, revisiting all the standard tropes,

Symbolic culture is not tightly bound to material practices, but the

is available in a folder titled “Publication ‘Aluminum, the Magic Metal,’” in

growth, world iron production remained thirty times greater. The

48. Brubaker, Trends, 35–36; U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity

unlikely that the ratio of wood to aluminum will change signiﬁ-

Aviation: Aluminum as Progress

tion, in which aluminum appears simultaneously as high-tech and

53. Except as noted, this section is based on Schatzberg, Wings of Wood.

The war was fought with machines constructed of wood, which

The displacement of wood by metal would not be as easy as the

num alloy substantially reduced the danger of intercrystalline em-

The debate over airplane materials suggests that speciﬁc meanings

61. Aluminum in Aircraft (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1930), 5–10.

Aluminum as Ersatz: Electrical Wiring

Aviation was one of aluminum’s greatest triumphs, connecting the

64. C. C. Connor, “Electrical Conductor History,” c. 1959, Alcoa Marketing

twisting aluminum wires around a steel core. This combination,

dures. In 1957 electrical engineer Martin Bergan, an expert on alumi-

number of American houses with aluminum wiring in 1971 between

72. Elaine D. Bunten, John L. Donaldson, and Eugene C. McDowell, Hazard

wiring was in effect temporarily banned. New aluminum alloy wires

75. Commerce Committee, Hazard Hearings, 211; “Aluminum Battles a ‘Haz-

nity of aluminum—a belief that would help explain the Pittsburgh

78. Wilson, “Man’s Distinctive Work,” 2–4.