The following is an expanded
article based upon a lecture that I gave
that the New
England Bladesmiths Guild’s “Ashokan 2004” seminar.
The Anatomy
of Hype
Is it me or has there been a change in the intensity at
which the manure is being spread on the knifemaking field? There have always been the Carnival barkers
and flimflam artists on the fringes of the business but it just seems that the
fringes are closer to the center these days. Perhaps it is pressure from the
economy driving normally reasonable folks to resort to heavier slicksterism to make ends meet, or perhaps it is a sign of
the times that good old fashioned honesty is no longer enough for folks get
ahead, but from print and DVD to knife show table, the hype is getting deep
these days.
Not only are the
usual cast of characters ratcheting up their intensity until they are spinning
off into their own movements to freely broadcast the unbelievable to the
believers, but many of the level-headed reliable makers are forgetting humility
is a virtue and are going for glory at the expense of their colleagues. I do not envy the collector or knife buyer in
this developing environment. One always had to seek the needle of truth by
sifting through a haystack of myth, but now the hay is begin whipped by a hot
air cyclone with more chaff being added all the time.
As a knifemaker sympathetic to the guys who just want to buy
a good knife, and the folks who want to start making knives but are fed a sales
pitch instead of facts on how to do it, I resent what is happening. So I thought I would share some of my
insider observations with you in hopes of helping sort out the chaff. It may
not tickle the funny bone of all who read it, or be received with
universal fanfare, but unblinking looks at the truth seldom are. It would seem that positive change is never
accomplished without rocking the boat.
The greatest peacemaker of all time rocked the boat so much, and ruffled
so many feathers, they had him crucified for it.
We start with some of the older and milder hype, the
standard stuff that we have come to accept like a rash that after six months
you just sort of live with. Even though
it is merely an annoyance to those who have always seen through it, it is still
hype all the same, and is also the foundation upon which much of the more
dishonest stuff is built.
The steel of the
month club
If you have been in
this business for more than 5 years you will have noticed this quirky little
phenomenon, which amounts to little more than what clothing fads in high school
were. Every year a new steel is either
freshly made or discovered (it was always there, just one genius bladesmith
figured out how to make it work), that will change knifemaking as we know
it! Everybody has a friend, who has a
friend, that has a blade made from it, and it will out-cut every steel known to
man, but especially last year’s fad steel.
All of the knifemaking members of the steel of the month club will
immediately jump on board and start making their blades from it. Of course they will all swear it is indeed
the greatest steel they ever tried and that everybody needs to abandon their
old steel and get some, yet within a year nobody seems to be able to remember
last year’s “steels of the month.”
Often the driving force behind the steel of the month club
is the same as that which determines high school clothing fads. The popular and famous Mr. Jack Bladesmith,
M.S., uses the steel of the month so we all must get some! Some folks even feel left out if they are not
using the steel of choice in the Federation of Knife Forgers, or the New York
Brotherhood of Blade Grinders. The
problem is that few of us actually take time to research a particular steel and
what it was designed to do, but instead simply look at what others are using
without ever asking if it is really working for them, or if it will really work
for us.
Which brings us to another driving force behind the steel of
the month club, the desire to find a magic bullet; most of us either lack the
confidence, motivation or time to develop our skills to make a really good
blade, so we look for a magic steel that will
automatically make our blades “the best.”
It is not too different from the person who wants a pill to lose weight
instead of actually having to change their eating habits and exercising. Knifemaking is no different than any other
human pursuit; there are no shortcuts to excellence. The finest knife steel in the world would
still perform poorly if not worked and treated correctly.
I sincerely believe that one of the reasons that steels of
the month are so hot for a short time is that the guys pushing it make their
quick buck before folks actually use it enough to realize it is just another steel with no magic at all. Fortunately for the scam artists that offer
the steel of the month, those disillusioned masses never totally snap out of
their trance, but instead grab onto the next steel of the month hoping to
replace the short of promised performance with the new hot steel that is the “real
deal”. If one ignores the clamor and
looks at the big picture, campy fad steels come and go but there are a few
boring old favorites that have been working great for knives forever, and why
is this? Because they work, they are too
common to be sensationally unique for they were designed by industry to cut
things and they do.
A humorous side note about the steel of the month club, it
cannot seem to be able to survive a blind test.
I am aware of several occasions when certain wise guys have announced
that they have found the next steel of the month at bladesmith gatherings and
then challenged all the fad steels present, but refused to reveal the type or
the source of their new wonder steel.
The knife is then turned over to the fad steel junkies to cut to their
hearts content, resulting in total amazement at the wonders of this new alloy
that can indeed out-cut all the other steels of the month. They must know what it is! They must know how
to get it! It is then the hook is set
and the fish are reeled in. It is
revealed that the new wonder alloy is very well heat treated… O1!
The magazines love the steel of the month club because it makes
fantastic headlines that sell issues even faster than the steel itself. Headlines like “CPM x54y! The
new super alloy?” or “64200! Can anything beat it?” send Steel of the
Month junkies over the top in a gluttonous run on magazines filled with articles
about guys who are using the new super steel, the same guys who advertise in
those same magazines… are you seeing a
pattern here?
Speaking of the
magazines…
You are what you eat, and since magazines eat, drink, and
breathe it, not only do they thrive on hype, they are hype! At the heart of knifemaking is metallurgy,
have you ever tried to read a metallurgical text? It is such a dry read that it
makes the
These folks will not want to pour over soak times for
alloying content, stress strain curves and the possibility that the resulting
product will just be steel, with all of the strengths and weaknesses inherent
to that material. Heck no! What keeps
them coming back are articles on how they can beat the factory knives with that
scrap of steel they found next to the road, by using ancient forging techniques
and “special secret recipe” lard quenches. In those 120 or so pages are the
secrets of barnyard geniuses who could
put all of the metallurgical labs out of business, and render entire libraries
obsolete, if their arcane knowledge was shared with more than the privileged
few wise enough to seek out that magazine!
I am not implying that magazines intentionally engage in
misinformation, but one has to realize that the bottom line is sales and not
the altruistic pursuit of the facts.
Even if they were concerned with getting the boring facts straight, how
many knife magazines do you think employ a staff metallurgist to review submitted
information to see if it is accurate or even physically possible? My observations show me that the closest they
come to a staff metallurgist is the author that has been writing the longest,
or the guy who sells the most ink.
Common sense should dictate that relying on the current
knife publications for guidance in metallurgical fact, or even how to produce a
quality metal product, is equivalent to using the National Enquirer for
financial decisions; although I find the horoscopes in the back of the Enquirer
to be accurate 22% more often than the knife magazines (and they actually are
based upon mystical, ancient, arcane secrets).
The Mysterious East
This one is nothing new and it is not limited to knives. It
is as old as the travels of Marco Polo.
Tales too tall even for medieval Europeans to believe were somehow
credible because they came from the mysterious terra incognito to the
east. Back then anything could be
possible because those other continents were as alien and unknown as another
planet, but somehow we never outgrew the mystique, even after we came to know
those lands as well as our own. No
longer do we see dragons off the edges of maps, but average Chinese and
Japanese folk who lead 21st century lives just as mundane as our
own, yet we still want to believe that their ancient knowledge really is magic,
while ours was just superstition supplanted by science.
In the West we are absolutely mesmerized by the East. It may
be a case of the grass always appearing greener on the other side of the fence,
or it may be that things which are different from our normal experience stir
our imagination more, but we can be easily had by draping something in an eastern
façade. If the movie “Gremlins” had
involved a guy going into the junk store of average Americans resembling Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson, it
would have been nothing but an unbelievable, pure comedy, but the movie worked
with westerners because it is possible that there were magical little
undiscovered creatures hiding in an old Chinese store.
Flip open a plant or seed catalog and look at the odd
experiments in grafting that some folks have done and could never sell if it
were called the “Ohio twisted cherry,” but hang a magic label like “Chinese
contorted cherry” and you can’t keep enough around for all the folks who need
one of those exotic specimens. A friend
and I once thought of a scam that could utilize this ploy, illustrating it
quite well. The North American opossum
is perhaps the ugliest and least respected natural denizens of our
country. If one had an opossum with some
hair missing, you couldn’t give the mangy thing away, but if you shaved it
entirely, multiplying the ugly factor by ten, and called it a “Japanese
hairless opossum,” you could ask any price and probably have to start breeding
them on a farm to keep up. It is not the
hairless part that makes the difference, the “
Wootz is another super material that borrows some of its
“super” status from the east. Ooh, those
ancient Persians, and Indians, with Djinis, magic
spells, and withered holy men, that
steel had to be better than anything those smelly ignorant crusaders had ever
seen. The rest of the wootz mystique is picked up by the old “lost secrets of
the ancients” shtick. Those bumbling eggheads blinded by science still cannot
top that magical crucible cake, until they get in touch with our ancient roots
and become as wise as those guys.
If we were to hear that a Viking sword, made from ancient
indestructible steel created by a lost folding and welding process, could
easily cut a modern gun barrel in half, of course we would laugh. Those simple minded, hairy-helmeted
barbarians couldn’t dream of matching our modern alloys. But most eagerly consume, and regurgitate
with fervent belief, that the Japanese katana is still the finest steel
implement ever made by man and effortlessly halved numerous machine gun barrels
in WWII. Reality - the European tribes
had developed pattern welded blades to levels and patterns the katana never saw
before the latter was really developed as we know it.
All other smiths in the world are beat obediently into their
proper place under the East, with the cudgel of the Japanese bladesmith. Any
dissention must unconditionally submit when it is mentioned that this is the
way the Japanese swordsmiths do it. This is absolute
garbage! There are just as many
boneheads in
Shhh… it’s a secret!
This is one that most people should see right away as
clearly suspicious, yet in its simplicity it is still one of the most
successful ways of collecting a following, gaining attention, or parting a fool
from his money. We all want our favorite
maker to be a step above and beyond industry and any other makers;
unfortunately he is still only human!
How can he then do things that no other human can do? They way charlatans have done it for
thousands of years - claim to have a secret that nobody else has.
When one considers that people have been working iron for almost 3,000 years, and making blades from one material or another for around a million, it is almost inconceivable that people will still swallow the idea that the guy screwing around in back of his garage down the street has come up with a secret about knives that nobody has ever thought of, but they do. The real reason that these bozos guard their secrets so well is that if we found out how common the knowledge really is, we would look at them like the idiots that they think we are. Even if there really were secrets, the problem with relying upon them to stay on top is that as soon as your secret gets out, you fall to the bottom of the heap again. Your entire position as a top smith is built on a house of cards. What secrets really reveal is the smith’s lack of confidence in his own work to maintain his position or reputation. If I appear more pointed about this one it is because I have yet to find a real “secret” of any true value, and the whole concept is quite juvenile.
Eye of newt, and toe of frog…Double, double, toil and trouble…
What
catches your attention more?
“Austenitize at 1500F., soak for 5 minutes, quench into 150F. Parks AAA quenching oil and then
immediately temper at 425F. two hours for a Rockwell
hardness of 58 “C” scale.”
Or
“Carefully heat a blade made from a 1952 Studebaker spring
(other years will not make a superior blade) over knotty pine charcoal after
the last rays of the sun have left the horizon (the twilight illumination is
better than total darkness). Heat evenly
while tapping the tang to distribute the carbon properly without losing the
benefits of hammering. When a magnet
stops sticking let it cool until the steel shimmers like an opal on fire, then repeat and quench in olive oil. Do this five times,
quenching into bacon grease the second time, canola oil the third time, peanut
oil the fourth time and then finishing in the urine of a red haired virgin that
has eaten a goat fed nothing but fern fronds.
Tempering must be done on a copper plate with a silver coating to keep
the copper from contaminating the process.
Float the plate on a pool of molten lead until the temper is drawn from
the lead into the blade. This will
produce a blade of excellent cutting ability as it was shown to my grand pappy
by a blacksmith’s grand pappy.”
The first is too mundane and commonplace to produce a knife
worth collecting; any idiot could do it by just reading a book, what is so
special about that? Ooh, but that second
one! Only a handful of smiths in the entire world could do that correctly, and
their stuff would be like no other! This is entirely correct, only a handful of
smiths would even want to do such silliness and they would have to be very
good, or very lucky, to get a functional blade out of it. With this pile of
smoke and mirrors, the inventor is assured to be a master of it; nobody else
can figure the mess out!
The esoteric ritual is almost a sneaky subcategory of the
“secrets” angle, but in this case the hype-master has no problem sharing all he
knows, since nobody could make any sense out of it anyhow. Magicians are fond of pretty assistants in
flashy dresses, and dances with loud hockey music, they know where your eyes
won’t be and in all that confusion they can get you to believe anything. A part of us want to believe in magic so
badly that eclectic potions and elaborately unorthodox procedures draw us in
and get us to stop asking the simple questions, which are basic to reason and understanding,
in order to maintain the fantasy.
Have you ever noticed how when we really want control over
people, we utilize rituals? Be it religious
cults, secret societies or the darkest corners of the Nazi Regime, rituals are
a most powerful tool in capturing the mind of others. Of course I am not comparing kooky
bladesmiths with Nazi’s, but involved rituals, even when hidden in an odd shop
practice can have some profound effects.
Where do they get this stuff? Well I am happy to say that I
believe that only a few isolated individuals actually resort to inventing these
rites in order to cloud the minds of others. For the most part rituals can be a
way of recreating success when stabbing in the dark with blind trial and error
happens to work one day. Instead of
messing with success by randomly eliminating any details, it is safer just to
repeat it all, no matter how trivial, in order to achieve similar results. Many
smiths make claims of superior results from a technique that followed years of
inferior results, their control reference are the previous bad blades. They may have tools inadequate for the alloy
they have chosen, requiring some extraordinary means to achieve ordinary
results. Almost every case of esoteric heat treating rituals I have seen were a
result of trying to fit square pegs into round holes. The selected steel may
only require a simple heat treatment when using the well calibrated equipment
the manufacturer assumes you have, but if all a smith has is an oxy-acetylene
torch, he is going to have to get rather “creative” to achieve even average
results. The majority of smiths doing silly things are not sinister and are
just sort of winging it the best they can, and only then discover that it
attracts customer attention; even when a lab rat falls on a lever and gets
food, he doesn’t forget about that lever. For the most part their antics are
fun to watch, but we must remember that it is still hype with which they will
try to take our money.
What are some signs of the esoteric ritual? Complexity is
one, it needs to be complex so that most people just get confused or
intimidated instead of looking too closely, or the elimination of even the
minutest detail could leave them floundering for answers again. It also seems to have to be quaint in a
folksy way, like some home remedy brought down from the remotest regions of
The
wild, wild, west.
There is a reason why frontier towns have always attracted
those with less than honorable intentions among us, there are no laws yet. On that border between the known and the
unknown, anything goes, and who is to say otherwise? A lot of money can be made by the “creative”
entrepreneur before the law arrives. So
it is with steel technology. There are
many areas just being explored, and many that were abandoned because they were
of no practical value, the cleverest of hype pitchers can use this as a golden
opportunity, to make all kinds of wild claims and go completely
unchallenged. What is even better about
this scam is that you can actually make the available science appear to support
your claim. Anytime a would-be miracle
worker can make a scientist scratch his head and admit he just doesn’t know, he
has achieved a major coup. I have even
seen scientist hoodwinked into believing the line, hey they are people
too.
Some examples of misuse of the frontiers would be some of
the more outrageous claims that have been made by those offering cryo services. There
could very well be many unexplored effects from extreme cold, but there are too
many claims that are stated as fact that have not been proven at all yet. The standard comeback here is, “how do you
know that we aren’t the ones to discover it?” You may be, but if so then throw
it all on the table and have mainstream science confirm it before you start
taking people’s money.
Some of the new
frontiers are actually old ones, abandoned by science for shady characters to move
into them with little resistance. An
example of this would be the “wootz is magic” crowd. Only a handful of people have bothered to
make the stuff in the 21st century, and even less than that have any
real understanding of it. The vast majority of materials scientists are just as
mystified by it as the average knife magazine reader. Almost any claims can be made about it and go
completely unchallenged. A quick study
of history will reveal that it was not a magic, forgotten process that produced
a super metal the likes of which the world has never seen since. It was instead
a unique solution to a widespread problem in the ancient world that was simply
rendered obsolete by advances in metalworking and then abandoned. Of course some who make it would argue this
quite passionately, but then they do have a stake in it don’t they?
Red Flags (The
earmarks of hype)
Is it sensationalistic?
Real data is boring, hype by its very nature is
often larger than life. Hype is like a
breast enlargement, the majority of folks doing it are already insecure about
their true assets so when inflating them why be subtle? Go double D’s or nothing! Real improvements
over proper heat treating may produce 10% or 20% increases in performance, and a
real hypemeister just can’t settle for such petty
boasts. When we see claims of 50%, 100%,
or even 200% or more in performance, we need to ask, if this guy has a process
that can double the performance of steel, what the heck is he doing making
knives for living? He should own a few major corporations by now.
Catch phrases and charged or loaded words. If it reads like it was intended to catch your
eye in a headline, it probably was. Watch for things like “ultra-steel,” “the
super
Parlor tricks
Beware of what is offered as proof. The word “testing” is very much abused. Most demonstrations or tests of superior
performance claims only seem to work so long as the B.S. artists are performing
their own tests under their own terms. There are legitimate tests and then
there are parlor tricks. Parlor ticks usually won’t be nearly as impressive
under objective laboratory conditions; in fact you will rarely see anybody
willing to attempt them in such an environment.
Since hype is almost never subtle, parlor tricks are often
above and beyond anything a knife would have to do or involve nothing that
resembles a knife application. Knives are meant for cutting things, often in a
most mundane fashion. Knives are not
masonry tools, they don’t need to puncture steel plates, or bear the weight of
a man on the handle. When was the last time you had to do any of these things
while using a knife? When we see the
carnival barkers standing on the end of a clamped blade, we just need to ask
“that’s nice, but does it cut?”
Unfortunately, too often the edge is like a square bar in order to allow
the blade to penetrate the sheet of steel.
For some reason some guys cannot compete against knives that just cut
things well.
Real tests are boring, laborious, and the results are subtle
enough to necessitate much repetition. A
test that would yield truly useful data, the type engineers could use to
actually make a better product, would not be a good crowd pleaser at any knife
gathering. Tensile, hardness, impact, or abrasion testing would be about as
exciting as watching paint dry, and crunching the real numbers would bore most
makers to the point of tears. Isn’t it
funny how anything that really has value always results from real tedious work?
Take me to your
leader
Beware of gurus that encourage followers, it is narcissism
at the least, and megalomania at its worst. We are just metal workers for
crying out loud, none of us have a star on the sidewalk in
This can, and often does, begin to take on the trappings of
a cult. Often the groupies will start
wearing objects or clothing that will identify themselves
as members. Although a bit shameless, this is still harmless P.R. gimmickry if
the maker surrounds himself with uniformed helpers, but it can and has gone in
a more sinister direction. Some may feel
they have the power to start being a major influence in other areas of life and
they can only do this to the most vulnerable of victims. I have seen some blade making gurus whose
followers I would advise not to drink any Kool-Aid offered to them.
A pile of bricks, or a sheet of canvas painted solid brown, is only considered “art” because of the group of mind numbed toadies competing to insert their noses the deepest in the colon of the leader passionately saying it is. Things are often no different in knifemaking. A vicious circle arises from the high price some of our stars can charge. A fool that pays a ridiculous amount for a mediocre knife is going to find it very hard to swallow their pride and admit that the blade is anything but the finest tool ever made by man, and the man who made it is a mere mortal. Depending on how influential that fool is, you may even see more press coverage of the maker of that mediocre knife in order to boost the collectors ego as well as the value of his collection. This results in an odd inverted fame situation in which the better a maker really is, the less hype he needs to prop up his work, so the less you will see him mentioned in print. Check out who it is that judges awards at the largest shows, and how much press their choices get out of it, and ponder the possibilities of why?
I am Oz! The great
and powerful! ...Pay no attention to that man behind the
curtain!
As long as you are in awe of what you are being shown, his
true nature is safely concealed. So he will bedazzle with any misdirecting
special effect he can. He will
point to things that are meaningless and attach enormous profundity to
them. “Look at this engineered
stress absorber in my
Oz
will find things like odd colors or deviations in a carefully prepared blade
surface, and point to them as proof of greatness while offering no explanation
as to what the heck they are or how they effect anything - pay no attention to
the man behind the curtain, dammit!
Oz will borrow many big scientific sounding words and wield them like a sword, until he is asked to define them or use them in proper context in a sentence, then you must pay no attention to those words he quickly threw behind the curtain! Science is the great deceiver, come to lead you astray from the wisdom of Oz! At this point even the scarecrow should throw his brain back at him and walk away shaking his head.
Hype is as old as mankind itself, even older if you consider all the frills, tufts, and appendages which animals incorporate to make themselves appear 10 feet taller to any passing female, it just seems less honest among humans because none of it involves our actual assets, other than our talent to deceive. But can I fault a seller of a product for using highly effective marketing or salesmanship? Perhaps not, but I can hope for honesty at the heart of things. It is a free market and the consumer must shoulder some responsibility when considering “caveat emptor.” But when salesmanship spins out of control, the quacks get so good they can even convince themselves and believe their own line. Even before then, for the sake of maintaining the show, they will present their balderdash as fact to would-be buyers and makers, impressionable in their eagerness to learn from somebody so impressive.
Hype can best be dealt with through a very simple and ancient axiom - if it is too good to be true, it probably is.