The Forest Products Laboratory 



the beginning of our present century, little knowledge derived from 

 pure scientific research into wood products and the wood products 

 industries. However, by that time certain forces were well under way 

 that were destined shortly to produce results and create an entirely 

 new factor in the field of wood-using trade methods of America, and 

 other countries also. 



CHAPTER II 

 EARLY PERSPECTIVES OF FOREST UTILIZATION 



Abundant forests have made the United States the greatest 

 M'ood-using nation of the world, but they have made it also the great- 

 est wood waster of the world. Our lumbering i)ractice has been built 

 upon supplying the best the forest affords and leaving the rest as 

 waste. Our forefathers commenced the practice because they had 

 more forests than they knew how to use. Pioneers, moving westward, 

 continued the system. And limiber consumers, educated to expect 

 the best, continued to demand the best. Thus the great dictator of 

 forest utilization in this country has ])een custom instead of specialized 

 knowledge of the properties of our different woods. The power of 

 knowledge has been capitalized in a mechanical science for converting 

 forests into lumber and manufactured products, a science which is 

 unsurpassed anywhere in the world, and which has made wood avail- 

 able in a greater variety of forms than any other material with which 

 man comes in contact. It has made wood, as Roosevelt asserted, an 

 indispensable part of the structure upon which our civilization rests, 

 but its ready convertibility to man's multitudinous needs appears to 

 have held passive, so long as forests seemed inexhaustible, the stimulus 

 to study its properties. 



The world today very generally accepts the view that forests are 

 essential to progress and to social and industrial supremacy. The 



