{"id":30089,"date":"2016-05-17T01:00:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T05:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30089"},"modified":"2022-03-03T11:00:05","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T16:00:05","slug":"qotd-iron-steel-and-stainless-steel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/17\/qotd-iron-steel-and-stainless-steel\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Iron, steel, and “stainless” steel"},"content":{"rendered":"

As my father the industrial designer used to say, \u201cStainless steel is so called because it stains less than some<\/em> other steels.\u201d But give me, by preference, wrought iron from a puddling furnace, for I don\u2019t like shiny. Unfortunately it is not made any more except on a small craft scale: but I have, in the kitchen of the High Doganate, a pair of Chinese scissors that I\u2019ve owned nearly forever, which have never rusted and whose blades stay frightfully sharp (they were only once sharpened). They cost me some fraction of a dollar, back when forever began (some time in the 1970s).<\/p>\n

Too, I have an ancient French chef\u2019s knife, nearly ditto, made I think from exactly the steel that went into the Eiffel Tower. It holds an edge like nothing else in my cutlery drawer, and has a weight and balance that triggers the desire to chop vegetables and slice meat.<\/p>\n

And there are nails in the wooden hulls of ships from past centuries which have not rusted, after generations of exposure to salt sea and storm. Craft, not technology, went into their composition: there were many stages of piling and rolling, each requiring practised human skill. (The monks in Yorkshire were making fine steels in the Middle Ages; and had also anticipated, by the fourteenth century, all the particulars of a modern blast furnace. But they gave up on that process because it did not yield the quality they demanded.)<\/p>\n

What is sold today as \u201cwrought iron\u201d in garden fixtures, fences and gates, is fake: cheap steel with a \u201cweatherproof\u201d finish (a term like \u201cstainless\u201d) painted on. These vicious things are made by people who would never survive in a craft guild. (Though to be fair, they are wage slaves, and therefore each was \u201conly following orders.\u201d)<\/p>\n

However, in the Greater Parkdale Area, on my walks, I can still visit with magnificent examples of the old craft, around certain public buildings \u2014 for it was lost to us only a couple of generations ago. These lift one\u2019s heart. I can stand before the trolley stop at Osgoode Hall (the real one, not the Marxist-feminist law school named after it). Its fence and the old cow-gates warm the spirit, and raise the mind: if the makers sinned, I have prayed for them.<\/p>\n

Almost everywhere else one looks in one\u2019s modern urban environment, one sees fake. This, conversely, leaves the spirit cold, and lowers every moral, aesthetic, and intellectual expectation. To my mind it is sinful to call something what it is not \u2014 as is done in every \u201clifestyle\u201d advertisement \u2014 and to my essentially mediaeval mind, the perpetrators ought to be punished in this world, as an act of charity. This could spare them retribution in the next.<\/p>\n

David Warren, “For a Godly materialism”, Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2015-01-31.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As my father the industrial designer used to say, \u201cStainless steel is so called because it stains less than some other steels.\u201d But give me, by preference, wrought iron from a puddling furnace, for I don\u2019t like shiny. Unfortunately it is not made any more except on a small craft scale: but I have, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,73,487,161],"tags":[1159,1459,207],"class_list":["post-30089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotations","category-randomness","category-tools","category-woodworking","tag-materials","tag-metalworking","tag-toronto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Pj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30089"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72077,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30089\/revisions\/72077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}