¶ Wood Technology
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Index Entry
Wood Technology:
"wood boxes disappeared from our cellars. In the war’s great motion, packing cases went all over the world. That broke the wood supply equilibrium altogether. World increased paper needs and the new chemistry of wood-energy conversion makes it unthinkable that wood will ever again be available in any large way for building it into houses, even into prefabs which average 70 percent wood. Wood is suddenly going from ‘for free’ as it sat stacked on the farm because it had to be cleared away, to a rapidly inflating price structure-- owing not so much to its scarcity, as to its newly recognized inherent wealth.
"On the other hand there are now many by-products of the soil and by-products of the wood, which chemistry is developing, whether it is cellulose as plastics, or the metals developed from the clay, etc., which were just kicking around unrecognized on the early farm. These by-products, however, were very expensive to extract in the beginning and called for a large energy expenditure and fancy and complicated mammoth plants with giant stills and ovens such as required millions of dollars to install and develop. Few industries could afford to buy the original speciality by-products of high performance characteristic.’
¶ Citations
- DESIGNING A NEW INDUSTRY, ( RBF READER, p.216), 1946
