But it became clear as the war was winding down that Grumman needed to reduce its labor force-employment went from more than 20,000 to slightly more than 5,000-as well as find new markets as the demand for military aircraft nearly vanished.
Courtesy of the Mason family Wartime Productionīy the middle of World War II, Grumman was the major supplier of aircraft, such as the famed F4F Wildcat and F6F Hellcat, to the U.S. Here he’s shown shooting the rapids in a Grumman canoe. Hall’s company, Pittsburgh Reduction, was the forerunner of Alcoa, still one of the world’s largest producers of aluminum.Ĭanadian artist and author Bill Mason became the face of Canadian canoeing to many people. This has been done more-or-less successfully since at least the 1850s, although the real breakthrough came in the 1880s, when American Charles Martin Hall and Frenchman Paul Heroult, working independently, devised a cost-effective extraction method based on electrolysis (eventually named the Hall-Heroult process). It is almost always mixed in ores, such as bauxite to be used efficiently, it must be separated from its ore and processed. Aluminum had a brief history with watercraft, full of stops and starts and mostly dead ends.Īlthough aluminum is the world’s most common metal, it is not found lying around by itself in huge veins, ready to be mined. THE FIRST OF THE POST-WORLD WAR II CANOES to hit the market successfully in a material other than wood were built of aluminum-not a synthetic material, but not an element with a huge market share in mass-produced boats. This excerpt explores the then-revolutionary advancement into the first aluminum canoes-made right here in the U.S.A.Įxcerpted with permission from University of Minnesota Press Canoes: A Natural History in North America by Mark Neuzil and Norman Sims, foreword by John McPhee. Canoes: A Natural History in North America reveals the evolution and design of this ancient watercraft. Photo credit: Jon “ShakataGaNai” Davisīefore man first wrought tools of bronze, before ancient Egyptians built the pyramids or even before written language, there were canoes.ĭespite newer, stronger, lighter materials, the canoe remained largely unchanged for the last 5,000 years. The boats could be stored outdoors year-round without much damage, and even the most inexperienced couldn’t hurt one too much. Grumman canoes became a common choice of canoe liveries by the 1950s. After World War II, the manufacture and performance of American-made canoes experienced a surge thanks to a new material: Aluminum.
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