Ideology and Technical Choice: The Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States, 1920–1945

Abstract

Ideology and Technical Choice: The Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States, 1920—1945 ERIC SCHATZBERG In 1989 the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” Sunday comic strip featured the British Mosquito combat airplane, which “during World War II . . . was one of the fastest planes in existence. The photo­ graphic reconnaissance version of this aircraft . . . was able to fly non-stop over Europe so high it was neither seen nor heard. It was constructed entirely of wood.” Believe it or not.1 “Ripley’s” claim is accurate and even understates the Mosquito’s success as a bomber and fighter in combat against metal aircraft.2 “Ripley’s” does not seek to provide historical instruction, but rather to evoke surprise and disbelief. Why should a successful airplane with a wood structure evoke surprise and disbelief? The reason lies in the symbolic meanings that our modern technological culture associates with different materials. Wood symbolizes preindustrial technologies and craft traditions, while metal represents the industrial age, tech­ nical progress, and the primacy of science. The airplane is one of the defining technologies of the 20th century, the age of science-based industry. The wooden airplane is thus a symbolic contradiction, representing both science and craft, modernity and tradition. These symbols not only shape our current perception of the wooden airplane, they also played a crucial role in its demise. Between 1919 and 1939, metal replaced wood as the dominant material in the structures of American airplanes. The decline of wood Dr. Schatzberg is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He is finishing a book on the shift from wood to metal airplanes. He thanks Walter Vincenti, Mi Gyung Kim, Michal McMahon, and Ken Lipartito for helpful comments. Research for this article was supported in part by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, a NASA/AHA Aerospace History Fellowship, and a Dean’s Graduate Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania. '“Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” Washington Post, May 21, 1989 (emphasis in original). Tor a detailed account of Mosquito operations during World War II, see C. Martin Sharp and MichaelJ. F. Bowyer, Mosquito (London, 1967), pp. 117-371.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3501-0005$01.00 34 The Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States 35 began when the American aeronautical community enthusiastically embraced the development of metal airplanes shortly after World War I. Despite the nearly universal belief among aviation engineers in the superiority of metal, wood remained an essential material for airplane structures into the early 1930s. The persistence of wood was the result, I argue, of the indeterminacy of the technical choice between wood and metal. In the 1920s, the technical evidence favored neither wood nor metal overall. Technical criteria thus cannot explain the aviation community’s enthusiastic support for metal construction. In addition to technical arguments, supporters of metal invoked a nontechnical rhetoric that linked metal with progress and wood with stasis.3 Using this rhetoric, aviation engineers expressed their belief in the inevitable triumph of the metal airplane, a belief I term the progress ideology of metal. This ideology insured that research and development resources went overwhelmingly to improving metal airplanes. My interpretation differs fundamentally from the standard techni­ cal histories of the airplane, which accept at face value the arguments for the inherent superiority of metal and portray the shift from wood to metal as an essential step in the technical progress of aviation. These accounts are classic exercises in Whig history, judging the past in terms of its contribution to the present. Their heroes are the pioneers and prophets of the victorious path, the path leading to the all-metal stressed-skin airliners developed in the United States during the early 1930s. The standard histories do little more than codify the aviation community’s own mythology and thus cannot reflect critically on the basic assumptions of that community.4 My approach, in ’The boundary between the technical and nontechnical is, like all linguistic catego­ ries, subject to negotiation and dependent on the particular problem...