68
Thus, furnaces continued to work day and night to turn war machines into
commercial, industrial, or domestic goods. Swords were turned into ploughshares
and tanks into toasters. The redeployment of recovered metal atoms was not
driven primarily by a sense of stewardship of resources or an environmentally sustainable ideal. It was the market that recognized the potential in obsolete war
machines as the ready feedstock of a new economy that drove recycling materials at
this time.
A thing becomes obsolete when it can no longer serve the purpose for which it is
made. War, by its very destructive nature, increases the rapid obsolescence of everything produced to support it. The largest war production machine ever built, now
converted to produce in a time of peace, had to change both what it made and the
way it made it. The terms “durable goods” or “hardware” have different meanings
to someone in battle than to a consumer out shopping for kitchen appliances. In the
absence of constant destruction on the battlefield, obsolescence became a feature
that had to be designed into every new product for sale in the post-war economy.
Dynamic obsolescence could be designed through the eventual mechanical failure
of a key product component that fails through normal use before the rest of a product does. More commonly, a consumer product is obsolete not when it physically
fails but when cultural forces dictate it is no longer suitable—when it goes out of
fashion.
In order to keep companies in business making things, more people had to do
something the opposite of what they had just finished doing. They had to buy more
of what the factories produced. And in the quarter century following the War,
Americans did just that. The popular pre-war attitude, governed by a sense of scarcity, gave way to one that celebrated the abundance available for the modern consumer class.
1
The notion of duty to country remained. It was also converted from a war time
virtue to one that fueled consumption. However, to do one’s duty as an American
now meant to, as my grandmother would regularly lament, “Throw out and buy
new!” American consumers, many of the same people who won the war through
sacrificing, going without, and giving nearly everything they had, needed to be convinced to adopt new attitudes and new habits. Whether explicitly or implicitly,
American post-war industry and the consumers buying from it were in tacit agreement to meet a certain amount of demand from the supply that was readily available
and to not let it go to waste.
1 The concept of planned or dynamic obsolescence was introduced in the 1920s and 1930s but was
popularized by the industrial designer, Brooks Stevens, in 1954.
4 Do Something: Mid-twentieth Century Developments
Thus, furnaces continued to work day and night to turn war machines into
commercial, industrial, or domestic goods. Swords were turned into ploughshares
and tanks into toasters. The redeployment of recovered metal atoms was not
driven primarily by a sense of stewardship of resources or an environmentally sustainable ideal. It was the market that recognized the potential in obsolete war
machines as the ready feedstock of a new economy that drove recycling materials at
this time.
A thing becomes obsolete when it can no longer serve the purpose for which it is
made. War, by its very destructive nature, increases the rapid obsolescence of everything produced to support it. The largest war production machine ever built, now
converted to produce in a time of peace, had to change both what it made and the
way it made it. The terms “durable goods” or “hardware” have different meanings
to someone in battle than to a consumer out shopping for kitchen appliances. In the
absence of constant destruction on the battlefield, obsolescence became a feature
that had to be designed into every new product for sale in the post-war economy.
Dynamic obsolescence could be designed through the eventual mechanical failure
of a key product component that fails through normal use before the rest of a product does. More commonly, a consumer product is obsolete not when it physically
fails but when cultural forces dictate it is no longer suitable—when it goes out of
fashion.
In order to keep companies in business making things, more people had to do
something the opposite of what they had just finished doing. They had to buy more
of what the factories produced. And in the quarter century following the War,
Americans did just that. The popular pre-war attitude, governed by a sense of scarcity, gave way to one that celebrated the abundance available for the modern consumer class.
1
The notion of duty to country remained. It was also converted from a war time
virtue to one that fueled consumption. However, to do one’s duty as an American
now meant to, as my grandmother would regularly lament, “Throw out and buy
new!” American consumers, many of the same people who won the war through
sacrificing, going without, and giving nearly everything they had, needed to be convinced to adopt new attitudes and new habits. Whether explicitly or implicitly,
American post-war industry and the consumers buying from it were in tacit agreement to meet a certain amount of demand from the supply that was readily available
and to not let it go to waste.
1 The concept of planned or dynamic obsolescence was introduced in the 1920s and 1930s but was
popularized by the industrial designer, Brooks Stevens, in 1954.
4 Do Something: Mid-twentieth Century Developments