After every war in the industrial age there has been a scrap-metal boom, beginning at least with the Civil War. Soon after Appomattox, leftover iron from monitors, cannon, and the like flooded the market. In fact, the overcapacity of iron foundries at the end of the Civil War played a role in the birth of cast-iron architecture in New York City.

At the end of World War II, for the first time, there was a huge surplus of aircraft. In September 1945 the U.S. Army Air Force and the Navy had the largest fleet of warplanes the world had ever seen—and almost nothing to do with them all. Tens of thousands of planes, from war-weary B-17s on derelict bomber fields in England to brand-new F8F Bearcats on aircraft carriers off Okinawa, sat waiting for their next assignments.

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