Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Everything, everywhere: The story of stainless steel
We don’t always notice them, but we’re responding through the day, to sounds that tell us what to do – restart the car, reply to a text, wake up, pay attention, log in. From church bells to ad jingles, a look at their history and design
We live in such a visualsdriven world that it’s easy to lose track of the many sounds that direct our day, but we share a Pavlovian relationship with them nonetheless. The shrill car-in-reverse tone compels us to look around to confirm we are not in the way. We respond intuitively to the beeps just before a traffic signal changes; to the shutter sound of a smartphone camera; the whirring of a helicopter (studies have found that humans literally cannot not look up).
Perhaps the most hotly debated of these — the back-up beeper for cars — was created in 1963 by Matsusaburo Yamaguchi of the Yamaguchi Electric Company in Japan. It’s one of the most-hated audio inventions, but it has also proved to be life-saving.
“Our brains format the signals that comprise the physical world so they have meaning to us. Making sense of sound is profoundly governed by how we feel, think, see and move. Conversely, hearing influences how we feel, think, see and move,” writes Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist and professor at Northwestern University, in her book Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World (MIT Press; 2022).
Studies have found that sounds from our childhood and youth influence our emotions disproportionately. Auditory-induced nostalgia explains why the songs of one’s teen years hold greater sway than anything produced in one’s present times. For our parents, the same tunes remain meaningless. They’ll argue that there’s nothing better than songs of their teen years.
Finely tuned
The use of sound to influence mass action can be traced to 400 CE. A few decades after emperor Constantine embraced Christianity, church bells were introduced across the Roman empire, as a call to worship. The practice eventually spread around the world.
In the centuries since, sounds have been used to boost sales, raise brand recognition, evoke a certain emotion. The power of sound to sell was first recognised in 18th-century England, where the ad jingle was born. Local traders paid musicians to write and perform songs about them and their wares. The nursery rhyme Hot Cross Buns is believed to have started out as one such ditty.
The next big breakthrough came in the mid-19th century, with the invention of sound-recording technology. By the 1920s, the radio had spawned the broadcast jingle, with the first such ad being the Wheaties commercial that told people in the twin cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul that this cereal was “the best breakfast food in the land” (sales zoomed from the sense of novelty and brand recognition that this spawned).
By 1928, the film studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) had recorded its first roar (it’s been re-recorded several times since, as technology evolved). It still plays before every MGM movie and remains one of the world’s most widely recognised sonic logos.
Because sound-recording was such a complicated and expensive exercise, certain clips from the early years became stock sounds, and were used and reused to evoke certain emotions. These include the Wilhelm Scream (a short, desperate shriek), first used in the 1951 film Distant Drums and since featured in hundreds of movies, including Star Wars: Episode IV, when Luke Skywalker shoots a Stormtrooper off his ledge.
You might also recognise The Murder, a clip of screeching violins, violas and cellos composed by Bernard Herrmann and best known as the background score of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). These clips continue to be used, sometimes in satire or homage, but always to evoke the original emotions too.
Byte-sized
By the dawn of the tech age in the 1990s, the importance of audio mnemonics was wellestablished. So, when tech companies put the finishing touches on their user interfaces, they had a firm ear on the sound.
This is when some of the most iconic sonic logos were created.
Take the Intel bong. This seemingly simple five-note tune played at the end of every ad that uses an Intel processor was composed by Austrian musician Walter Werzowa and is actually made up of 20 different audio layers and uses a combination of synthesisers, xylophones and marimba.
At Microsoft, British musician Brian Eno composed the trilling six-second Windows 95 startup melody, on a Mac. The Apple / Mac startup sound, called Sosumi (a play on ‘so sue me’, after a lawsuit between The Beatles’ Apple Corps recording company and Apple Computers, over the word Apple), was created by then-Apple designer Jim Reekes.
And while the series of whirrs, beeps and screeches from the early years of dial-up internet connections are all-but-gone, some anachronistic audio cues linger on, even when they’re no longer strictly needed.
Smartphone users around the world, for instance, have Reekes to thank for preserving the one of a camera shutter closing and opening. Reekes recorded the sound from his 1970s Canon AE-1 SLR, and it’s still what one hears when the iPhone camera clicks.
As electric vehicles go silent, EV manufacturers are working with musicians and composers to craft pedestrian warning systems. “The advent of the electric car is a great opportunity... I want a silent electric car with sounds from the Star Trek: The Next Generation library... [or] the Flintstone sounds, the one you heard as the cartoons accelerate the vehicle by running their feet under the floorboard,” Reekes said, in an interview with the Medium publication OneZero in 2019.
For sounds not needed but essential nonetheless, look no further than the computer mouse. There is technically no need for it to click, and yet there aren’t many takers for a silent mouse. Users find the dissonance simply impossible to work with.
Stainless steel was an accidental invention. In 1913, an English metallurgist named Harry Brearley was testing various alloys for use in gun barrels. He wanted an alloy that was hard, so he tested different combinations — nickel one day, chromium the next.
About a month later, while walking through his lab, he noticed a gleaming bit of metal in the pile of rusted bits. He referred to his notes and realised that it was likely a new form of steel. For the bit in question, he’d taken the two elements that make up steel (iron and carbon) and added chromium.
Brearley was intrigued. Why would this piece alone not rust? It turned out this was because the chromium acted like a force field, reacting with oxygen to form chromium oxide, which in turn created a hard, transparent coating on the metal, a barrier against future oxidisation. If the surface was scratched, the chromium just re-formed the barrier, preventing rust in perpetuity.
Brearley called his new alloy “rustless steel”. As it happened, his hometown of Sheffield was a hub of cutlery-making at the time. A former schoolmate named Ernest Stuart was among the local cutlery makers. Brearley showed him the rustless steel, and it was Stuart that suggested the better-sounding name “stainless steel”.
Soon Brearley’s invention was in everything. In the kitchen, stainless steel knives meant one no longer needed a tetanus shot after an accidental cut. Over time, spoons became stainless steel by default; only people above a certain age will remember the metallic tang of the mixed-metal spoons that came before.
Razor blades, surgical blades, teeth braces all switched too; no rust meant the user was safe even if they got knicked or scratched. Sinks, kitchen appliances, pipes, even space rockets have taken to this metal, and new uses continue to be found.
In order to remain stainless, steel must be at least 10.5% chromium. Most high-quality food-grade stainless steel pans are specified as 18/8 or 18/10. These numbers reflect the levels of chromium and nickel respectively, in the alloy; higher numbers indicating improved corrosion resistance. Low-cost stainless steel may skip the nickel, but the resultant alloy is more likely to corrode over time, especially if it comes in frequent contact with corrosive acids or salts.
Some people prefer nickel-free stainless steel for kitchen implements, because there have been concerns in recent years that the nickel could leach into the food. Manufacturers have responded by offering stainless steel with the specification 21/0, commercially called Japanese stainless steel. But the truth is that people get a lot more nickel from foods such as peanuts, peas and milk chocolate than from cooking in a stainless steel pan, and all of these foods are of course safe to consume. On average, in fact, a person ingests about 150 to 200 microgrammes of nickel a day, through food.
If you have been diagnosed with a nickel allergy, however, it is best to avoid regular stainless steel. For the rest, perhaps the best thing about stainless steel is that it needs little to no care. It has none of the high levels of acidic leaching of aluminium pots; requires none of the conditioning of cast iron; none of the delicacy needed with Teflon.
You may sometimes see a rainbow stain on a stainless steel pan. This is harmless and the result of too much chromium oxide deposited over time. It can be erased by rinsing the pan with a light acid such as lemon juice or diluted vinegar. If using hard water, look out for a powdery deposit from the calcium in it. Like the rainbow stain, it may be resistant to soap but will dissolve in the presence of acid. A simple rinse and it can go back on the shelf or in the drawer, with a little thank-you to the deity of happy accidents.