History and Development
Modern plywood, as an alternative to natural wood, was invented in the 19th century, but by the end of the 1940s a shortage of lumber made it difficult to manufacture plywood affordably. Particleboard was intended to be a replacement. Its inventor was Max Himmelheber of Germany. The first commercial piece was produced during World War II at a factory in Bremen, Germany. It used waste material such as planer shavings, offcuts or sawdust, hammer-milled into chips, and bound together with a phenolic resin. Hammer-milling involves smashing material into smaller and smaller pieces until they pass out through a screen. Most other early particleboard manufacturers used similar processes, though often with slightly different resins.
It was found that better strength, appearance and resin economy could be achieved by using more uniform, manufactured chips. Manufacturers began processing solid birch, beech, alder, pine and spruce into consistent chips and flakes. These finer layers were then placed on the outsides of the board, with the central section composed of coarser, cheaper chips. This type of board is known as three-layer particleboard.
More recently, graded-density particleboard has also evolved. It contains particles that gradually become smaller as they get closer to the surface
Read more about this topic: Particle Board
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“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)