James Baquet

Many of the building materials that we use today have been used for millennia. The use of lumber, bricks, tile and even concrete all date back to prehistory.

But one material commonly used today (aside from plastic) is the humble product known as plywood.

Imagine a log (called a “peeler”) placed along a long blade and slowly turned, so that it is thin-sliced into a sheet of fairly flexible material (much like a piece of paper being taken from a roll). Now lay that piece down and coat it with glue, and place on it another sheet, but this time with the grain perpendicular to that of the first sheet. Do it again, following the grain of the first sheet, and so on. After several layers, you will have a sheet of wood made of several “plies” (hence the name plywood) that is stronger than a piece of lumber of comparable thickness, but with a modicum of flexibility that actually enhances its usefulness. It is then dried under pressure and heat, and “graded” according to the quality of the materials.

Lamination was known to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, but machines for the production of the material as we know it were first patented in England in 1797 by Samuel Bentham, a mechanical engineer and naval architect. His plywood was to be used in shipbuilding, where it could be curved to the ribs in the hull of a ship. Bentham, by the way, was brother to the famous Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who defined the most moral behavior as that which led to “the greatest happiness of the greatest number [of people].”

Around a half-century after Samuel Bentham, another inventor named Immanuel Nobel (father of Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, among other things, and left his money to be given out as the annual Nobel Prizes) improved on Bentham’s designs and invented the rotary lathe, a machine for turning wood in the way I described above.

Another benefit of plywood is that, when it is used in fine woodworking such as tabletops or cabinetry, quality veneers can be used for the outer layers, and cheaper materials (including those with cracks and voids) can be used for the inner plies. This gives a high-quality appearance at a lower cost.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. small amount

2. improves, makes better

3. ability to bend

4. one who designs ships etc.

5. empty spaces

6. periods of 1,000 years

7. modest, insignificant

8. thus, therefore

9. assigned a value

10. protected by law as one’s own