Kodak No.2 Cartridge Hawk-Eye - nonferrous or ferrous metal body?

I have questions regarding what seems to be a historical mystery with a dose of inaccurate information liberally spread from some source’s original error. Every website, blog, v-blog, wiki, and several books that I can find covering Kodak box camera history all state that the company started making these box cameras with a metal body by the 1920s. (1924?) That body is almost universally stated as being aluminum.

Now, my curiosity really started to burn when I noticed what was clearly rust on the body of a Kodak No.2 Cartridge Hawk-Eye that I was considering for a restoration project. “Click!” Hmmm…a magnet seems to believe that the body is ferrous metal. Okay, interesting! I pulled out the inner sheet metal guts thinking the magnet had been attracted to that material. Nope! The body is made of a ferrous metal.

Are there any serious scholarly collectors, or museum research experts, out there who could shed some light onto whether an aluminum body was actually made for any Kodak box cameras before the 1930s or not? It is very curious to me that a construction variation to the aforementioned aluminum material is not mentioned in any sources that I’ve found. It seems highly unlikely that I’m the only person to have stuck a magnet to the blame things and gone, “Huh, that ain’t aluminum.”

The other niggling little thing bouncing around in my brain is the fact that aluminum was known and used in the early 1900s, but it would have been rather costly. The material's cost would have been high enough that I doubt Kodak would have made a line of “economy” cameras out of aluminum even by the mid-1920s. It doesn’t make sense.

Thanks for reading to this point...curious mind... no verifiable answers!
Tre

I always assumed they were made of the same materials that tin cans were made of, tin coated steel. There are iron and aluminum alloys but why would they do that, I'm not even sure that alloy was in use back then.

My thoughts exactly! I'm just puzzled as to why reference materials continue to state that the metal bodied examples were made of aluminum. These statements go back to websites posted years ago and books published decades ago. I can't be the only idiot with a magnet who has actually field checked this information. Funny thing is that I purchased my first Kodak No.2 Cartridge Hawk-Eye several years ago at an antique mall simply because I had never seen a metal-bodied example before that moment. It is even patterned to look like a traditional leather covering. I recently posted photos taken with another one I purchased and photos of the camera itself on Flickr.

I have both metal and cardboard models but never paid much attention to what the web sites said about them. I guess we can chalk it up to "fake news". Someone probably mistakenly said they were made of aluminum and it grew legs from there.

Aluminum cost a fortune back then, it would make no sense to make box cameras they made and sold cheeply out of aluminium. For example, aluminium barrel lenses cost a king's ransom. Maybe people said they were made of that metal so they would seem to be worth more $$, or maybe they just didn't know ?
If you contact the George Eastman Museum in Rochester they will be able to tell you exactly what they were made of.

You make a very good point about contacting the George Eastman Museum. I've been drafting my query to them. I do believe that somewhere and sometime someone incorrectly listed it as having aluminum construction and as BAC1967 said "it grew legs from there." During my day job as a librarian (and history buff), I know that primary resources can be wrong. Shhhh... that's a trade secret.