FROM WOOD TO METAL: THE EARLY HISTORY

Wood was the dominant structural material for airplanes from the pre-history of flight until the early 1930s. By the late 1930s, however, wood was rapidly disappearing, especially in the structures of high-performance military aircraft and multi-motored passenger airplanes. Metal succeeded as a result of intense efforts to develop all-metal airplanes, efforts that began in Germany during World War I and quickly spread to Britain, France and the United States after the Armistice.4

In both Europe and the United States, national aeronautical communities maintained a powerful commitment to developing metal airplanes between the world wars. As I have argued elsewhere, this commitment cannot be explained by the technical advantages of metal. The technical choice between wood and metal remained indeterminate between the world wars; wood had advantages in some circumstances, metal in others. Claims for metal’s superiority in fire safety, weight, cost, and durability all proved equivocal throughout the 1920s.5

Despite the questionable advantages of metal in the 1920s, national governments and private firms concentrated their research and development programs on improving metal airplanes, while shortchanging research and development on wood structures. This bias was especially strong in the United States, where the Army Air Service began shifting research funds from wood to metal as early as 1920. Nevertheless, successful metal aircraft proved quite difficult to design, and the U. S. Army remained heavily dependent on wooden-winged aircraft until the mid-1930s. After about 1933, however, new all-metal stressed-skin structures proved competitive with wood, especially in larger airplanes. Even with the substantially increased production costs required by the new all-metal stressed-skin structures, wood quickly disappeared from most high-performance airplanes in both the United States and Europe.6

One cannot, however, invoke metal’s eventual success to explain why this path was chosen in the first place. Metal’s success resulted from years of intensive development before the predicted advantages of metal became manifest. Proponents of metal advanced no clear-cut technical arguments to justify continued support for metal in the 1920s, when experience with metal failed to corroborate claims for its superiority to wood.7 In the United States, at least, the embrace of metal was driven not so much by technical criteria as by the symbolic meanings of airplane materials.

Metal’s supporters openly articulated these symbolic meanings in the 1920s. They insisted that the shift from wood to metal was an inevitable aspect of technical progress, arguing that the airplane would recapitulate the triumph of metal in prior wood-using technologies, such as ships, railroad cars, and bridges.

Advocates of metal drew upon pre-existing cultural meanings to link metal with progress, modernity and science, while associating wood with backwardness, tradition and craft methods. These symbolic associations gained their evocative power from the ideology of technological progress, a set of beliefs deeply embedded within the aviation community. By linking metal with progress, advocates of metal were able to construct a narrative of technological change that predicted the inevitable replacement of wood by metal in airplane structures. This narrative provided more than rhetoric; it also inhibited expressions of support for wood while insuring that metal received a disproportionate share of funds for research and development.8