The Hardboard Industry and America's Future

Bv R. G. \Tallace Vice President, Masonite Corporation

If evidence is needed to refute the pessimistic view that American resources are drying up and that we, as a nation, have reached the peak of our industrial expansion, one need only look at the record made during 1943 by an industry that did not even exist 20 years ago-the hardboard industry.

Even before America's entry into the war, and the cottsequent demand for greater production of all kinds, hardboards and pressed woods were filling many needs in industry, as well as in the building and construction trades. Today, hundreds of manufacturers of essential war and civilian goods have turned to wood plastics, adapting them to additional uses undreamed of a few years ago.

The great future of hardboards, however, lies not in the place they have earned for themselves in wartime production, but in peacetime adaptation of these uses and in the many new fields which American ingenuity and research will find for them in the post-war period. Hardboards have done a hard job well, and industry has accepted them, not as temporary wartime expedients, but as tried and tested raw materials with infinite uses.

Increasing demand for wood plastics and semi-plastic hardboards by America's war industry reached such a peak in the second year of the war that nearly all its output was diverted from pre-war uses to the production of essential war and civilian goods. In spite of manpower shortages and other hazards generally experienced by all businesses today, the industry has established a remarkable record, and, in the case of my own company, one that has received high recognition in the form of an ArmyNavy t'E" Award.

One of the first of the great industries to turn to hardboard materials was the booming airplane industry, which used the controlled plasticity of lignocellulose pressed woods to make dies for routing, forming, shearing and stamping the light metal parts used for wing and fuselage sections. Every airplane manufactured in the United States today for service on battlefronts contains thousands of parts formed on Masonite die stock.

When restrictions were placed on the amount of metal which electrical manufacturers could use in the production of fluorescent lighting reflectors, the electrical industry turned to hardboards. Pressed wood, they found, will take a high enamel finish which produces eight to ten per cent more illumination than the old type rnetal reflectors.

In the farm field, companies supplying poultry and farm equipment in the home front battle to maintain our food production at a high level, discovered that hardboards and pressed woods are ideal for the prefabrication of chicken houses, feeders, hog houses and other structures.

After the war, wood plastics will again provide new opportunities for the builder of both prefabricated and conventional type homes. The same type of pressed woods that' provide strength, economy and ease of fabrication ft r dies that stamp out parts for airplanes will lend these qualities to the construction of future houses.

I am neither a scientist, an economist nor a prophet. But to anyone who questions American industry's potentialities for growth and development, I offer that which I do know-the great-advances made by my own company and my own industry. That many other industries can present equally impressive evidence of expanding oPportunity and capacity for service, I have no doubt.

It is further significant that, in the case of the Masonite company, the many products which developed from the late William H. Mason's invention of pressed wood only twenty years ago, are, for the most part, manufactured from the slash pine which otherwise is virtually useless in the lumber industry.

Far from entering the confines of a restrictive economy, there is every reason to believe that our country stands on the frontier of an era in which man's increasing ability to put the resources of the earth to work for him will mean a better future for all of us. As this ability is translated into practical developrnents to provide employment for labor and a fair return to those who have risked their capital to make the venture a success, that future will be realized.