Lumber Finds Widening Market

By Frank C. Wisner, President, National Lumber Manufacturers' Association, Published in "The Nation's Business"

Someone is always telling us in the lumber industry how near at hand is the end of lumber. A month or two ago, Prof. Gerald Wendt, in an article in Nation's Business, read its furieral oration.

And he isn't the first one. In 1879 Carl Schurz thought lumber manufacturing would be fading by 1900. As late as IW Gifford Pinchot gave lumbering twenty or twentyfive ycars at the outside. Yet in 1925 as much lumber was cut in the United States as the average for the great years of 1900 to 1910.

Now the lumbermen have no "irrepressible conflict" with the advocates of substitute materials for wood, but they naturally object to being railroaded out of business by them. They know that wood cannot be as freely used by 120,000,000 people as by 30,000,000 people with the sources of supply necessarily reduced. If there were nothing but lumber to build with, there would soon be no building.

Substitutes Help Lumber

Their experience in general with meritorious substitutes for wood is that they create unforeseen uses for wood; every new disuse seems to turn up a new use. They know that whereas substitutes for wood have been in the field both in housing and in manufacturing for centuries, the world continues to consume at some price all the lumber and other forms of wood that the mills produce. Human nature, with its likes and dislikes, depending more on feeling than on logic, more on experience and custom than on reason and political economy, cannot be persuaded at once to alter its ancient habits by a few laboratory demonstrations and snap judgments.

When sewed shoe soles came in it was reasonable to predict the disappearance of the shoe-peg, but millions of people, especially in Europe, prefer the pegged shoe, and a single factory in New Hampshire is still turning out the little birch pegs by the billion.

When the business and manufacturing sections of our cities began to turn to concrete construction, thus cutting off a great outlet for lumber, many lumbermen were aPprehensive of bitter days; but it soon developed that concrete created a great new market for lumber for its forms and scaffolding.

When the automobile began to restrict the demand for buggies and wagons, there was more apprehension, but presently it was found that the automobile industry was requiring a billion and a half feet of lumber a year for the bodies of cars and sturdy boxes and crates in which to 'ship them.

Lumber Replacing Steel was a new alarm because of the advent of the all-steel body, but already the body manufacturers are turning back to wood, and the greatest of them all--the Fishers-have just bought 60,000 acres of timber land to insure future supplies for fifty years. Canny Henry Ford buys iron ore deposits-but atso several hundred thousand acres of timber.

We have had such substitutes as brick ever since the tower of Babel and before, and yet seventy-five out of every hundred dwellings erected in the United States today are frame, and about 45 per cent of the material bill for the remaining 25 per cent is for lumber.

We have had metal for furniture since time immemorial, but the new Palmer House in Chicago, and the still nbwer and greater Stevens-the largest hotel in the world-have chosen wooden bedsteads instead of steel and brass. The latter, by the way, has found wooden window frame and sash preferable to steel, after all these years of steel sash. Despite the zeal of its manufacturers, metal furniture has 'scarcely made a dent in furniture production.

The old plank road of the fathers has gone, but nobody has found a suitable substitute for 80,000,000 wooden crossties a year for the railways that have superseded them .and use a thousand feet of wood for every foot that went into plank roads. The rail traffic of the nation is vastly more dependent upon wood than the pioneer roads were-on -plqn-k. We would still have board walks if our feet could decide, and when we want a foot-ease stroll we go to Atlantic City zrnd pace the board walk.

Nothing yet discovered is a really good general substitute for wooden floors. After years of experimentation rvith various substitutes for wooden top-flooring, big new office and factory buildings are returning to wood.

With universal refrigeration has come a new universal use for wood.

Steel ships have mostly replaced wooden ships, but it

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' . (Continued from Page 10) takes lumber to make them livable and the surfaces of decks are of wood. The wooden masts have gone, but the great booms and spars of the loading gear are mostly wood, and, still most of the world's piers and wharves are wholly wood, or rest on wooden piling.

There was no substitute for walnut when Napoleon paid $3,000 a ton for that wood for musket stocks which wouldn't break when muskets were used as clubs, and there was none when the rifle factories were turning out millions of rifles a year in the World War.

Wood Has Advantages

Rayon (itself rvood) substitutes for silk, but rayon and all other textiles depend on little pieces of persimmon and boxwood-shuttles and bobbins and no substitute in sight.

Wood is both light and strong, tough, resilient and elastic. It can be worked and fabricated with small tools easily portable and used on the job. It can be shaped by lathes and pressed into manifold forms with startling rapidity. Weight for weight it is as strong as steel and much stronger than cast iron. It burns, but heat does not distort it, and it is rustless.

Wood is a natural heat, sound and electricity insulator, which is doubtless one of the reasons of the instinctive liking of American people for as much wood as possible in their dwellings. The well-built frame house is a conserver of heat and reducer of fuel bills. It is the architect's delight because lumber is so adaptable, so varied in form, and its structures so alterable; and so suited to color schemes, because it takes to paint like a duck to water.

Wooden balls do not hold moisture and make tombs of houses for living men. The best insulators to make up for the absence of wood in masonry houses are themselves manufactured from wood fibre.

The human hand loves the feel and delights in the grip ofwood. Scarcely a rvorking tool is known that does not have the handles of wood or cised in wood. None of the synthetic materials rival it in this respect. None of the new ones have its strength and adaptability. None of them has its resiliency, and few its durability. After years of trial, nothing has been found equal to the artillery wheels for automobiles, and the army is turning back from the steel wheel to the wooden wheel forits field guns. Wood still holds the fort for the most part in railway freight cars, and on the score of comfort and elegance would still be the favored material for passenger coaches.

The newest great industryradio manufacturehas found no new snythetic to dress it up. Radio cabinets and shipping boxes demand hard and soft lumber in enormous quantities. Had it not been forthcoming the radio industry would have limped into glory instead of carrying it by assault. Radio has opened such a market for lumber that there have been times rvithin the last two years when the lumber used in radio cabinets in certain territories was more than went into house building.

No miracle of the laboratory yet promises to supersede locust wood for telephone and telegraph insulator pins, juniper and cedar for pencils, basswood and ash for butter and organic oil containers, persimmon and dogwood for shuttles and bobbins, hickory and ash for axe-helves, hubs, wheels, etc., pine for casting pattepns, birch for tooth-picks, poplar for clothes pins, cedar for chests, cypress for laundry appliances, dogwobd for golf-club heads and pulleys; and hundreds of other specialized industrial uses for different species of wood.

So protean is the suitability of wood for human uses that despite all the synthetic materials the variety of its uses is increasing. Ten years ago but 2,000 uses of wood could be enumerated; a census now in progress has discovered 4,500.

The prophets and advocates of a synthetic or non-lumber future, house and tool, wall and furniture, talk vaguely of economy. Are all these new plastics or resinoids that we hear so much talk about to be manufactured without cost and transported and applied without labor? Can they com' pete with-wood in final cost? Can the factory make-them, ior all purposes, as cheaply as 470,000,000 acpes of land, most of which cannot now, and probably not for a long time, be used better than in the growing oftrees? Can costly electric po\\'er, controlled- qhgqistry and the dete-riorating machine compete yith the etiiqn{.chemistry of the free sun and the perpeiual miracle of i& tireless green ieaf ?

Where Wood is Essential

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MANUFACTURERS

CALIFORNIA WHITE AND SUGAR PINE

LUMBER

BEV-EL,LED SIDING MOULDINGS BOX SHOOK

CUT SASH AND DOOR STOCK

ALIIO

DOUGLAS FIR AND WHITE FTR

WESTERN SALES OFFICE

Market

The proposal to replace wood by a combination of pheng-l and form'ataenyde has the sotind of simplicity - itself, especially as wi are assured that "it is superior to'wood in every respect." Automobile frames, for instance, where the resiliency and sound insulation of wood make it supreme today! Imagine Babe Ruth swatting a home run

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