Page 313 - Synthetic Fuels Handbook

FUELS FROM WOOD 299

encouraged a new concern for America’s forests. Theories were published that purported
to prove that the fall of ancient empires, radical changes of climate, and the spread of epi-
demics could be attributed to deforestation.
But America’s wood-and-water phase reached its own plateau around 1850 and about
200 years after that phase had peaked in Europe. Our heads were turned by European
technology that was now based on the coal-and-iron complex. Some of our traditional
uses of wood—for fuel, pavement, sailing ships, charcoal, and iron smelting—were
taken over by coal, steel, and stone. However, demand for timber was maintained as
many new uses of wood, for paper, plywood, telegraph and telephone poles, railroad
ties, and chemicals entered the picture. The selection from among competing materials
was based partly on cost and availability and partly on properties and performance. It
is also noteworthy that such a range of choices coincided with the rapid mechanization
and increasing technical complexity of our society. Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth
century the use of wood products had begun to level off. For the time being, most of the
country stopped worrying about a timber scarcity. Coal was abundant and iron and steel
could be manufactured.
Up to the latter part of the nineteenth century no appreciable systematic research
on wood occurred—no research of the type we now call wood science. Wood had been
used by early experimenters to make instruments and other research equipment, and
early engineers had used it as a construction material and a material with which to work
out engineering problems and designs. Methods for pulping wood to make paper had
been worked out by the paper industry, too. Further, both cotton and wood had been
used by chemists as a source of cellulose for man-made fibers. This led to work on cel-
lulose acetate reactions with solvents that led to the ability to produce that compound
as both film and fiber. These advances provided a base for the subsequent technology
of nylon and established the principles by which countless numbers and kinds of linear
high polymers can be synthesized.
The carriage business provided an early milestone for a new era of wood research. In
1889 the Carriage Builders Association was concerned about the scarcity of northern oak,
a species long preferred for their craft. The builders wondered if southern oak, in plentiful
supply, possessed the same desirable characteristics as the northern species. The Division
of Forestry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture stepped in to help solve the problem.
Its research confirmed that suitable material could be obtained from the south as well as
the north. This incident was an important step toward comprehensive wood research as
we know it today. From 1890 to 1910, small amounts of money were appropriated by the
Division of Forestry to universities for wood research. Studies of the mechanical properties
of wood were begun, along with wood preservation and wood drying studies.
In 1910 the Division of Forestry, in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin, estab-
lished the world’s first comprehensive forest products-laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin,
to centralize the federally sponsored wood science efforts in the country. The birth of a
full-fledged wood research laboratory could not have happened much earlier. The leaps
and bounds science had taken in the nineteenth century provided the necessary foundation
for such a laboratory. Each of the major branches of experimental science made such great
progress then that in retrospect its earlier state seemed rudimentary. Scientists would call
this century the Golden Age.
During World War II, wood research covered the whole gamut of possible wartime uses
of wood but after the war the importance of timber products declined, on a relative scale, as
the importance of minerals increased, due in part to abundant low-cost energy in the form
of coal and then petroleum. It is worth noting, however, that metric tons of timber products
produced in the United States then exceeded that of all metals and plastics combined, just
as it does today. So, while timber declined in relative importance and public awareness, it
remained the major product of American manufacture.