Word: plywood
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that airplanes and their engines are still largely hand-built, precision jobs. Last week an airplane designed for mass production with a minimum of handwork was flown in California. It was Timm Aircraft Corp.'s blue-&-gold plastic plane-with wings and fuselage pressure-molded from thin spruce plywood and liquid plastic (like the bakelite of radio panels), then baked in an oven. Test Pilot Vance Breese (who has designed and produced another plastic model) put Timm's plane through its paces, convinced at least one Army observer (Colonel Joseph L. Stromme) that "this may mark the start...
...LIFE'S houses is a final architectural answer.* But together they tot up to a highest common denominator of good U. S. design. Laymen who looked at them could see the shape of housing things to come: a decline of the dining room, an increasing use of plywood-the club sandwich of wood and glue that can lick its weight in steel...
Better glues were made from casein, a protein ingredient of milk, and from soybeans. In 1912 Dr. Leo Hendrik Baekeland, father of plastics, took out a patent on a synthetic resin for plywood filler, but did not start to exploit it until 1932. In 1926 a German chemist, Dr. T. E. Goldschmidt, developed a filler made of tissue paper impregnated with phenolic resin. This made a bond so firm that the sandwich was stronger weight for weight than steel. It was also waterproof and bacteria-proof...
...plywood technology did not get under way in the U. S. until 1930 and is just now beginning to grow rapidly. Figures for 1937 (latest available) put total U. S. plywood production at $45,500,000. The figure for 1939 will probably be around $80,000,000. The stuff is being used for luggage, piano cases, radio cabinets, speedboats, concrete forms, truck bodies, prefabricated houses, cinema studio sets, boxcars, beer barrels, showcases, jigsaw puzzles, Ping-pong tables. Eugene Vidal, onetime head of the U. S. Bureau of Air Commerce, is now president of a small company which has developed...
...Plywood is made by putting a big log into a peeling machine, which strips off the thin wood sheets like wrapping paper from a roll. When the sheets are cut to size, the sandwiches are made in presses which deliver squeezes up to 200 Ib. per sq. in. The San Francisco World's Fair, which accounted for 10,000,000 sq. ft. of fir plywood, used plywood 29 layers thick for parts of its Colonnade of States...