A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 1365 



Only when lumber and other wood products are presented to the 

 consuming public in the best possible condition, with adequate demon- 

 stration of their merits, with a catering to unsatisfied desires, and in 

 accord with the findings of research, will it be time to consider whether 

 the national market for such products is indeed " inadequate". 



RESEARCH IN FOREST PRODUCTS 



It is submitted here that scientific research in wood and wood 

 products, steadily prosecuted and the results applied, can be followed 

 up to large practical gains in the production and marketing of the 

 forest yield in the lowering of costs, in insuring greater satisfaction 

 to the consumer in the service of the product, and in opening the 

 way to new products and enlarged uses. 



Other products have felt its influence ; in fact, scientific research is 

 the foundation and pattern of the industrial age. Through research, 

 products have been refined and diversified, new materials developed, 

 mass production in old and new lines made possible with consequent 

 cost reductions, and mass consumption awakened beyond the con- 

 ception of past generations. Most of our modern industries steel, 

 aluminum, and other nonferrous metals, alloys, glass, ceramics, re- 

 fractories, petroleum, foodstuffs, machinery, textiles, plastics, cement, 

 chemicals, electricity, etc. have come to depend on the research of 

 the scientists and the technician for their continued progress and the 

 expansion of their markets. 



With iron and steel, for instance, it was primarily the lowering of 

 production costs through the development of the Bessemer process, 

 followed later by the development of the open-hearth process, which 

 enabled structural steel to be marketed at prices which have resulted 

 in the use of millions of tons. It was the microscopic and phase-rule 

 studies of the coarser and finer crystal structure of steel that enabled 

 research to correlate crystal structure with strength properties, and 

 that have guided the development of steels of such innumerable 

 different properties as manganese steel, which is hard and tough and 

 used in grinding machinery; tungsten steel, which is self-hardening; 

 vanadium steel, which withstands shocks better than other steel; 

 chrome steel, indispensable in cutting tools; nickel steel, which resists 

 corrosion; duriron, which resists the attack of acids; and stainless 

 steel, containing chromium, which retains a mirrorlike surface in- 

 definitely. Without these successful efforts to lighten, strengthen, 

 and cheapen the material, our sleek and satisfactory automobiles of 

 today would still be the lumbering tractorlike vehicles of the early 

 nineties, and our rapid-fashioning machinery would be impossible. 



Aluminum, industrially speaking, is a comparatively "new" 

 metal. For years it was known that it was the most extensively 

 distributed of the metals, making up about 7 percent of the earth's 

 crust. It only awaited a means for obtaining it cheaply in metallic 

 form from the clays and rocks in which it occurs. One hundred 

 years ago it sold for $160 a pound. Research had brought down this 

 cost by successive stages to $4 a pound in 1886, at which time the 

 present electrolytic process was discovered. This discovery finally 

 placed aluminum production on a remunerative commercial basis 

 and was responsible for an output of more than half a billion pounds of 



