ABSTRACT
Despite its origin in natural elements – chromium, nickel, and iron – stainless steel was promoted by the steel industry as a technologically advanced and even super-natural material. It can be considered super-natural in at least two ways. Firstly, trade discourse emphasized its resistance to the forces of nature, to ageing, especially rusting, and broadcasted its persistent shininess. Secondly, it was presented as magical. While its original promotion was primarily functional – ‘non-rusting’ was a phrase commonly used in many of the earliest advertisements and industry news articles for stainless steel after 1915 – in the decades after the Second World War a more consumerist emphasis led to super-natural language of miraculous shine and hygiene. Thus, a rhetoric of stainless steel can be identified, which emphasizes logic on the one hand and wonder on the other. The symbolic meanings stainless steel has accrued are unique because of the wider socio-cultural contexts within which they are understood. The shiny metal is rooted in the histories of iron and steel, materials which, despite their strength and longevity, ultimately fall victim to arguably the most fundamental force of nature, entropy, in the form of rust. This chapter investigates the way in which stainless steel, as a gleaming, rust-resisting material, has been understood metaphorically as countering nature and has become associated with magic, not just the ‘magic’ of easy cleaning promoted in post-war advertisements of domestic goods, but also its origins in early technical knowledge of metallurgy associated with alchemy and pre-enlightenment thought.
