¶ Wood Technology (1)
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…Housing, as you have known it up to now, used the wood or stone or clay which was at hand. These component materials were not understood scientifically to any important degree. Wood might be considered pretty as oak, or pretty as maple. One was a little harder or softer to work and suited a man better than another. But it was little understood what a tree was. Despite academic study, man’s understanding of trees was popularly vague. Then trees began to be used industrially by the chemical industry. It began to develop wood pulps and other by-products of wood. To some extent this began to affect the ‘scarcity’ or ‘quantity’ of wood relative to its availability for house building. These new industries, particularly newsprint pulp, exhausted a lot of it. Builders had to take greener and greener lumber as stockpiling dwindled.
“During World War II one of the most extraordinary things that happened, in its broad effects on technology and on economics, is what the Germans were forced to accomplish in wood chemistry in order to plan on how to survive during this extraordinary industrial warfare, which they introduced and in which energy played such an important role. The Germans had to plan in”
