Original subtitles

- [Narrator] It gives us shelter,

holds up entire cities, and inspires our ingenuity.

- It really allowed man to branch out all across the world.

- [Narrator] The average American uses

640 pounds of it a year.

- [Steve] We have about 200,000 square feet

of warehouse space here, and that's still not enough.

- [Narrator] We may think we live in an age

of plastic and steel, but America still depends

on the time-tested strength of wood.

Welcome to "World of Wood" on "Modern Marvels".

[dramatic upbeat music]

[saw whirring]

Any way you cut it,

we need wood.

- Worldwide, we use about four billion tons of wood a year,

and that amounts to about three and a half pounds

of wood per person per day.

A lot of the times we use wood

and we don't even think of it as wood.

- [Narrator] Whether it's making a three million dollar

Stradivarius sing, or putting pencil to paper,

wood can do it all.

It can even be twice as strong as steel, pound for pound,

when it's used the right way.

Wood pilings are long posts driven deep underground

that can support 35 times their weight.

They hold up beach houses in Malibu,

the Brooklyn Bridge, the Superdome,

and even the city of Venice.

- The entire city of Venice is supported by wood pilings.

St. Mark's Cathedral's estimated that it's supported

by about a million wood pilings that were pounded

into the ground one by one to firm up

the soggy soils of Venice.

The pilings of Venice are about a thousand years old.

They're still there today.

They're still there doing their job.

- [Narrator] In the last thousand years,

the process of making wood pilings,

and how quickly we can do it, has been revolutionized.

- I would say probably in the last three weeks,

these logs were still standing as trees.

- [Narrator] First, not just any tree can become a piling.

[saw whirring]

[tree creaking and thudding]

- Trees in the forest,

there's only 10 trees per acre

that will be considered a pole or piling quality.

- [Narrator] Only the longest, straightest trees

make the cut.

At Kisatchie Treating in Louisiana,

yellow pine trees arrive stripped of their branches.

- One of the first processes we do is

remove the bark from the tree.

This here is the pole peeler.

All that system does is just tear the bark off the pole.

It's loud, it's mean machine.

- [Narrator] Cutting heads deliver a one-two punch.

The first has coarser blades to chew through

the thick outer bark.

The second takes off what's left of the inner bark.

- On an average we'll peel about three to 400 poles a day.

- [Narrator] Once peeled, the log is graded

based on length and circumference.

They cut the pole to the nearest multiple of five feet,

to standardize the lengths.

Pilings start out at about a 100% moisture level.

Before they can add preservative,

Kisatchie needs to cook off some of that liquid.

They move the pilings into a kiln where they'll be heated

to 225 degrees for 72 hours.

It's like a sauna for wood.

- It's enough to boil the moisture outta the piling.

Our target moisture is 23 to 27% of the piling.

- [Narrator] That's one quarter of the piling's

original moisture content.

What happens next is a step that is done more

to help preserve wood than anything before.

Pressure treatment.

Under pressure, preservatives will be forced

into the dry pilings where it will fight rot and insects.

Kisatchie has North America's largest pressure chamber,

at 150 feet long and eight feet wide,

and with one and a quarter-inch thick walls.

The big chamber means big chemical tanks.

- What you're looking at now is our preservative tanks.

They'll hold approximately 57,000 gallons.

Once we get the pilings into this cylinder,

we'll dump all the preservative into this cylinder.

This wood, it'll just suck that chemical into it.

- [Narrator] After sweating in the kiln,

the pilings are like squeezed sponges.

So they'll suck up the preservative

and return to the 100% moisture level.

Pressure will force the preservative

in faster and deeper.

- All right, we got the wood in here.

We got the process started.

It's gonna take about two, two and a half hours

to get it complete.

- [Narrator] First, they create a vacuum in the chamber

for 30 minutes to open the wood fibers.

Then they add the chemical and raise the pressure

to 150 pounds per square inch for 15 minutes.

This forces the preservative deep into the wood.

Then they pull a final vacuum for an hour

to draw out any extra fluid.

- [Lonnie] When the piling comes out,

it'll be dry to the touch.

- [Narrator] Infused with preservative,

the wood is ready for shipment.

This load is part of a much bigger order

heading to New Orleans.

There, the pilings will turn soft ground

into a school's foundation.

- To the common eye, this ground looks hard,

but when you start putting a lot of weight on top of it,

it won't support it.

It's a silty soil condition here.

- [Narrator] To create a stable foundation,

they'll drive pilings 40 feet down to a solid layer

known as the hard pan.

The pilings will act like stilts,

supporting whatever is built on top of them.

- Each one of these poles hold approximately 35 tons,

and the stress load that you're gonna use on top of that,

it's a fraction compared to what these things can hold.

- [Narrator] The muscle of the operation

is a modified crane known as a pile driver,

like the wrestling move named after it.

The pile driver isn't pretty, but it gets results.

First, the crew raises a one ton piling into position.

- [Jay] They're gonna go and pick up the butt of the pole.

They're gonna pull it all the way up to the top

of the pile driver.

- [Narrator] Then the crew has to create a guide hole.

- They'll do a process called water jetting.

And what this does is when you get in a silty

or sandy condition, the water jetting just displaces

the dirt for a moment.

- [Narrator] They've gotta drop the piling

before the dirt rushes back into the hole.

The cage acts like a guide or sled.

- It's gonna fall within the cage.

They're gonna drop this hammer hard.

[water splashing]

- [Narrator] Once the piling's in the hole,

they pound it deeper.

- This is a drop hammer.

And you know, the force that's being generated

by the drop hammer, depending on the weights

that they have on it, is tremendous.

- [Narrator] Each blow delivers a force of over two tons.

- This big white box on the back of the crane

is gonna generate the compression

to pull the hammer up

and then literally gravity itself is gonna do the rest.

The hammer ball is gonna drop,

and it's gonna hit the top of the pole,

and there you have it.

You're driving a pile.

- [Narrator] Hard hats are required.

And another piece of gear is highly recommended.

- It's helpful to wear earplugs all the time out here

'cause you can tell it's pretty loud.

Probably close to 180 decibels.

- [Narrator] 180 decibels is as loud as a stun grenade

and louder than a heavy metal concert.

They know they've hit the hard pan when they've pound

the piling 22 times, and it moves less than a foot.

The pilings compact the dirt around them,

creating friction that keeps them in place.

- And that's the reason why you come over here

and you shake these poles, you can't even get 'em to budge.

I mean, this stuff sets up like concrete

once the pole's driven.

- [Narrator] The crew can drive 40 to 50 piles a day,

so it'll take about a month to set the base

for a foundation.

After they drive all 1000 pilings,

they'll cut the tops to the same height,

connect them with steel and cement beams,

and then pour the concrete slab on top.

This will be the new school's foundation.

The school will eventually weigh 25,000 tons,

the equivalent of two cargo ships,

and every single pound of it will rest

on the timber pilings.

And the school is just one of hundreds of buildings

in the area that need wood to stay above the mud.

- This city is built on friction piling.

Pretty much New Orleans is built on stilts.

- [Narrator] Both New Orleans and Venice are waterlogged,

which seems like the worst places for wood,

but actually the opposite is true.

Why?

Because wood doesn't rot underwater.

- Once it's driven below the water table,

just below the surface of the earth,

they're not gonna have any oxygen.

And it takes oxygen for the rot and the different

bug infestation to occur,

so these things will never be touched.

They'll be here hundreds of years from now.

- A lot of people think wood and water just don't mix.

But the fact of the matter is as long as wood stays

constantly wet, it will last indefinitely.

One of the more surprising uses of wood is as a water pipe.

In England, they unearthed hundreds of miles of this stuff.

It's in New York City.

There's sections of Sedona, Arizona where the water system

is still made out of wood pipe.

So as long as it stays wet, it'll last hundreds of years.

- [Narrator] Ever versatile, wood gives builders

an excellent strength to weight ratio,

and won't rot underwater.

But it also has a weakness,

one that martial arts know how to exploit.

A 2000-pound wood piling can support 35 tons,

but even a child can smash a board.

- [Instructor] Yah! Yes!

- [Narrator] How can wood be so strong and so weak?

[wood splintering]

Many martial artists know the answer,

because breaking boards is a common way to teach

correct striking technique.

- Hah!

Hah!

Hah!

Hah!

- Breaking boards is comparable to breaking bones.

If you can break a one-inch board,

you can break a bone in the body.

So, students will practice breaking boards

as opposed to breaking bones.

- [Boy] Hah!

- [Narrator] But brute force won't split a board.

- Hah!

- [Narrator] You have to hit it with the grain.

- How you align the board does make a difference

in breaking it.

You wanna go with the grain.

You don't wanna go against the grain.

So when you put the boards down,

you wanna make sure that they're all aligned together.

- [Narrator] Hit it the wrong way,

[wood splintering]

and it's not the wood that breaks.

- I've seen people break their hands.

- [Narrator] What makes wood strong in one direction

and weak in the other, starts with a tree.

This is a wood factory.

Under the bark, the tree's fibers are long and tough,

like densely packed wires.

And each year the tree grows by adding a layer

of these fibers, creating rings.

- If you look around a forest,

you notice the trees are actually

these strange-looking columns.

They're actually pretty alien-looking.

They're these big, long growths that are very tall and thin,

and the force on them is almost entirely going down.

And so it makes sense that trees would've built themselves

to be strong towards compression.

You look at this thing and it is a column.

That's what it is.

And therefore, that's how we use it.

We use it that way.

Even when you're framing a house with joists

and two by fours, you're using the long direction

of the two by four for the strength.

- [Narrator] But how do you take material that's strong

in one direction and make it strong in all directions?

Like a car wheel?

Almost all early cars and more than three million

of Henry Ford's Model Ts had wooden wheels.

Many lasted longer than the cars themselves.

But today, if you need a replacement wheel,

you'll need it custom made by a specialist

like Bill Calimer.

He's one of the last people in the world

who knows the secrets of making a wheel from wood.

- For the automobile wheels I use hickory.

Hickory is a very strong wood,

and one of its major properties is it's bendable.

It's very flexible for the spokes as well,

and that allows the wheels to last a long time.

- [Narrator] Flexing or bending is the key

to using wood's strength to its fullest.

A Model T's spokes connect to a two piece section

of the inner rim.

These wooden pieces have to bend without stretching

the outer fibers, or they'll crack and break.

Bill starts by cutting one and a half-inch wide pieces

of hickory to form the two halves of the inner rim.

If he tried bending them now, they'd break.

So he prepares them for bending by putting them

into a steamer.

The steamer heats the wood to over 250 degrees

and will loosen the fibers.

- Now the rule of thumb for steaming wood

is that it should be in steam for an hour

of the inch of thickness.

And these are approximately an inch and a half thick,

so they're going to be in there approximately

an hour and a half.

- [Narrator] While the rim pieces steam,

Bill makes the spokes, starting from a master template.

Each car model has its own style.

- Up here I have primarily Model T Ford,

some early Cadillacs, Stanley Steamer.

This shelf is primarily Buick, later Cadillac,

Pierce, Arrow, and Oakland I see there.

- [Narrator] Using the template,

he marks and then cuts out rough blanks.

On an asymmetrical lathe,

the template serves as the guide,

and Bill can turn three new spokes at a time.

After 90 minutes in the steamer, the rim pieces are ready.

The heat has loosened the fibers enough

so that they can bend without breaking,

but outer fibers could still get stressed in the bending,

so Bill has made his own one-of-a-kind bending machine.

It presses down on the center of the boards,

pushes in from the ends,

and keeps constant pressure on the outsides.

The result, compressed fibers in the inner section

and fibers that haven't been stressed

on the outside section.

The rim pieces stay in the bending machine

two to three hours until they cool

so that they'll keep their shape.

In the next step, Bill lays out the spokes.

Once they fit together, he bolts them to a metal hub.

This forms what's known as a spider.

Now he has to line the spokes up exactly right

with the two halves of the inner rim.

- And it's very important to put the proper spoke

in the proper hole.

[drill whirring]

[hammer pounding]

- [Narrator] If they're bent correctly, they fit perfectly.

It just takes a little TLC and a hammer

to work them into an outer metal rim.

Last step, check that it's true and balanced.

- This wheel's looking pretty good,

is running pretty straight.

Now alls I have to do is make three more.

- [Narrator] Bill builds wheels for roughly

100 cars each year.

Ford churned out almost one million Model Ts in 1920 alone.

That's at least four million wheels a year,

which wasn't just a monumental feat.

It also created mountains of wood scrap.

Henry Ford hated waste,

so he and a partner figured out how to use wood scraps.

They turned it into charcoal.

Ford dealers sold it by the bag,

and would occasionally throw one in if you bought a car.

Barbecuing became part of the American experience.

In 1951, investors bought the charcoal business

and named the new company after Ford's partner,

E.J. Kingsford.

Today, Kingsford is the world's largest producer

of charcoal briquettes.

Its biggest plant is in Bell, Missouri,

where they use the same technique

and some of the same equipment as Ford once used.

- I'm standing at the beginning of the charcoal

briquette-making process.

This is a wood mountain, basically.

It's our hog fuel pile.

- [Narrator] The hog fuel pile is about 40,000 tons

of wood from local sawmills.

Enough to keep the plant running 24 hours a day,

seven days a week.

Kingsford consumes about 250,000 tons of it a year

at this plant alone, and over a million tons companywide.

They process so much wood,

it takes a bulldozer to load the conveyor belt.

The first step is to dry the wood in heated drums.

- [Steve] We're changing the wood from about 50% moisture

down to about five.

- [Narrator] From the dryer, the wood is then run

through a five-story oven known as a retort furnace.

This is where wood becomes charcoal.

- The retort furnace itself is really the heart

of the char-making unit.

- [Narrator] The key to making charcoal is super heating

the wood without burning it.

In a low oxygen environment,

the dried wood travels through five levels,

with temperatures reaching 1200 degrees.

It takes two hours to run the wood through the furnace.

It converts about eight pounds of hog fuel

into one pound of charcoal.

At this point, it's just a powder.

To make their trademark briquette,

Kingsford binds the powder with another secret ingredient.

- We're at the discharge end of the presses,

and the briquettes are coming out

with the K pressed in them.

At this stage, the briquettes are more like brownies,

and so the next stage we're gonna send 'em over

to the dryers and dry them down to about 5% moisture.

- [Narrator] Along the way, the briquettes go through

a shaker that takes off the rough edges.

Then they're sorted into one of three dryers.

- We have three briquette dryers.

Actually two of them came down from Ford Charcoal

in Michigan, so there are some old pieces of equipment.

By the time they get to the end of dryer,

they're now 5% moisture.

They're dry, rock hard, and they're ready

to send to package.

- [Narrator] Each 20-pound bag holds at least

300 briquettes.

- This is our distribution center at the Bell plant.

Recall we started at the wood mountain or wood pile.

This is the last stop before we send 'em off

to the customer.

We have about 200,000 square feet of warehouse space here,

and that's still not enough.

A lot of it's going right to the customer.

We'll probably see a couple hundred trucks

in and out each day.

- [Narrator] Kingsford sells more than a billion pounds

of charcoal every year, fueling an American tradition,

all thanks to Henry Ford's hatred of waste.

But Ford didn't invent charcoal.

Humans have been making it for thousands of years.

It was a crucial fuel for many cultures.

- Charcoal can burn at a much higher temperature,

and when you can get higher temperatures going,

you can use that to smelt metals, to smelt glass,

to smelt copper.

A lot of people think that some of the downfalls

of civilization were based on the fact

that some of these civilizations ran outta wood.

- [Narrator] Vast tracks of forest were cut

and burned to make charcoal.

And when they ran out, they looked overseas for more.

Wood got us off our feet and on a roll.

- The neat thing about wood is that it really allowed man

to branch out all across the world,

to get from where mankind was going.

If you were in a ship it was made of wood.

If it was on a ski, it was made of wood.

If it was a wheel, it was made out of wood.

- [Narrator] Wood was how we explored, and why we fought.

The British Navy ruled the waves in the 1700s,

but it needed a steady supply of tall,

strong trees for its ship's masts.

White pines in the new England colonies were ideal,

and so the British crown claimed the largest for itself,

even ones on private land.

Angered by this policy, in 1772,

colonists fought back in what became known

as the Pine Tree Riot.

[men angrily shouting]

Revolutionaries adopted the pine tree as a symbol,

and it was the emblem on their flag

at the battle of Bunker Hill.

Wood helped launch the nation,

and gave it rise to an American industry.

Lumberjacks harvested America's forests

until the Second World War.

- [Man] Three, two, one, go!

- [Narrator] Today, their traditions live on

as competitions, like the Johnny Appleseed festival

in Sheffield, Pennsylvania.

[upbeat country music]

These people love their wood.

- I'm Holly Waterfield and I wear wooden shoes.

We typically cut soft wood, so we're cutting aspen.

It's been under wet hay for a few months

and that helps it to even out.

We want it to have moisture in it.

Dry wood is a lot harder to cut.

And with the axes that we're using, they're very thin edged,

so dry wood has a tendency to damage and dull the edge.

So, we have soft, moist wood.

- [Man] All right, Holly Waterfield won!

- [Narrator] All the events come directly from skills

the original lumberjacks needed.

The springboard event dates back to when western lumberjacks

had to make their own steps in the base of a tree

to climb above its roots.

To prep for that event, competitors clear away the bark

and dirt so it won't damage their axes.

- Basically this is gonna be my bottom pocket

for my first board.

- [Man] Three, two, one, go!

[axes thudding]

And then once you finish, you gotta throw your axe up here

and then you're gonna throw your board in here.

Then you're gonna grab onto the handle of that axe

and use that as leverage to get up on your boards.

This takes a little bit of everything.

You gotta be balanced to stay on your board,

and your board's kind of springing.

It's kind of bouncing while you're up there choppin',

so it takes a lot of strength and endurance

to be able to complete the whole thing.

[crowd cheering and applauding]

- [Narrator] The underhand chop

and the cross-saw were used to cut down trees

and divide them into logs.

And log rollers helped keep huge stands of cut trees

moving downriver.

It was a dangerous business.

One slip and you could be crushed between the logs.

- They say that for every one man that died in the woods

cutting down trees, there were 10 that got killed

on the river drives.

So staying on top of the log was very essential

to staying alive on a river drive.

- [Narrator] Thousands of logs were driven downriver,

and if one got stuck in a rock,

that could all pile up in a matter of minutes.

It was a tangled, dangerous mess that gave rise

to the term log jam.

- And then a couple two or three lumberjacks,

sometimes more, would have to go in

and start removing logs at the bottom of the pile

to break that log jam and get the logs rolling.

And then that is when a lot of 'em met their demise

because oftentimes the whole wall would come down

at one time and bury several of 'em.

- This is a peg and raker saw.

So these are the teeth here.

This would be the exact same thing they use in the woods.

They go through a 17-inch log in about seven seconds.

- [Narrator] But in lumberjack competitions,

there's one machine you never see in the woods.

Chainsaws with engines built for much heavier loads

than cutting.

- It came out of a 1996 Ski-Doo snowmobile.

It's approximately 70 horsepower on paper.

Turns the chain right around 200 miles an hour.

It's a beast to hold onto.

It throws you around like a ragdoll.

- [Announcer] Ready, set, go!

- 17-inch log, I should be right around

five, four, five, five.

Three cuts and starting it.

We make it go fast.

This is as close as you can get to pure drag racing

as there is.

It's just you, the wood and the motor

and a whole bunch of prayin'.

[saw whirring]

- [Narrator] The original lumberjacks cut down trees

that were hundreds of years old and that had wood

that was straight and strong.

It was so versatile,

it became the country's building material.

From railroad bridges to ornate mansions.

Where is it today?

Some of it is hiding beneath the beat up exteriors

of houses and barns, and it could be worth a fortune.

Some wood is so valuable,

companies like Timeless Timberframe specialize

in recovering and reusing it.

They're taking apart a barn built in the 1840s

in southern Indiana,

and moving it 200 miles.

The pieces are all numbered and color coded,

then laid out for reassembly like a giant puzzle.

The work crew is Amish,

a group familiar with traditional building techniques.

- Today we are reassembling a barn that was built

in the 1840s.

These barns were built by master craftsmen

who settled here from Europe.

- [Narrator] These craftsmen left marks that reveal

what it took to carve out timbers.

They cut each one from a log.

- Somebody that was hewing a log

would score the log on top with a felling axe,

and that log would be flipped

and they could come on with a broad axe

and go straight down the side of it.

And you see that's almost a perfect 90-degree angle.

Incredible.

You're talkin' 15 to 30 work hours involved with

just making a timber square.

- [Narrator] Timber framing is also known as post and beam,

because those are the two basic parts.

The idea is to interlock large timbers

that bear tons of weight to create a large, open interior.

The barn's frame is a basic, but very solid structure.

Four bents or support sections connected by top plates.

The first step is to put each bent back together.

[upbeat country music]

- Today, we're lifting this bent section with a crane.

Years ago, they would've used a horse and block and tackle,

or the whole neighborhood.

This bent section probably weighs 3000 pounds,

and I wouldn't even want to think about having

to get that many guys here to lift it by hand.

Once the bent section is picked up and swung over in place,

it'll be set down on the foundation.

- [Narrator] The original builders didn't use metal nails

to connect the frame, and Timeless Timbers follows

the same process.

- These two beams are held together with mortise

and tenon joinery.

This is a tenon on the post.

There's also a tenon on this beam that comes over

and goes through this mortis hole in the post.

So this tenon is actually attached to this beam,

and they're pulled together and then they're joined

with wooden pegs.

- [Narrator] It takes the Timeless Timbers crew

less than a day to reassemble and place the bents.

The next step is to connect them with a long,

horizontal piece called a top plate.

- It's tricky because the wood has a memory,

and it wants to go back to the place that it was prior

when it was a barn for 140 years.

So when it's moved, it'll get outta square.

They're making adjustments to it right now.

Sometimes it's hard to get that top plate back

to where it needs to be to have everything

line up just perfect.

- [Narrator] Every piece has to go back together

exactly the way it came apart.

- When you look at a timber frame,

you have to look at the whole thing as a system.

When you're building a timber frame,

you can only be off less than an inch

on anything that you do.

If it's too loose, the structure will fall apart eventually.

If it's too tight, you're bound to break things.

Timber framing is an art.

- [Narrator] It's an art that Timeless Timbers keeps alive

in modern houses and artist's studios.

But for all its versatility,

wood does have its weaknesses.

Rot and fire.

Wood is so versatile.

We can submerge it,

bend it,

and even reuse it,

and it will remain as strong as ever.

But when wood alternates between wet and dry,

it becomes food for microbes and insects.

- There's a sailing term called sailing the bottom off,

and it's a perfect example of the underwater wood

staying good, the above water staying good,

and right where those two met, rot occurred.

The ship would literally separate where the water line

met the air line.

- [Narrator] Today, boat builders like

Chesapeake Light Craft try to avoid sailing

their bottoms off by combining wood with modern technology.

They create over 85 different boat kits

that an average person can assemble.

Almost all of them start out as specialty marine plywood.

- This is a plywood called Okoume.

It comes from Gabon in West Africa.

It's milled there into veneers,

and the veneers are sent to France

where it's made into plywood on special presses.

They use microwaves to cure the glue in the plywood

and put it on the CNC machine and cut boats out of it.

- [Narrator] At $125 per sheet,

the cutters want to get every possible square inch from it.

- The business end is this wood is essentially

a gigantic router.

This quarter-inch carbide bit we have to change

every single day because of the abrasiveness

of the glue in the plywood.

- [Narrator] It cuts at a precision of two thousands

of an inch.

[cutter whirring]

Paired with a router, a drill creates holes

for connecting the parts.

The CNC machine is programmed to cut thousands

of different parts, from whole panels to small patches.

One of Chesapeake Light Craft's most popular kits

is the Cocktail Classic.

It takes two people less than a day to assemble most of it.

At this stage, it's very similar to a traditional boat,

and would be prone to rot.

But when they apply fiberglass and epoxy,

they're adding a layer of modern materials

that seals out water and stiffens the structure.

- [John] We'll smooth the hull off

and add a layer of fiberglass over the entire hull,

which will multiply the strength of the wood

and eliminate maintenance.

- The end product?

A fast, rugged little boat

that will last for a hundred years or more.

While water can make wood vulnerable to rot,

fire can devour it in a matter of seconds.

In 1906, the great earthquake of San Francisco

damaged much of that city,

but it was a series of fires that devastated it.

They raged for four days and caused roughly 90%

of the destruction.

Wood fuels fire, which is why it's the ideal

material for matches.

But early matches contained many toxic chemicals,

and produced a vile smell.

They were known as lucifers.

In 1910, Diamond Matches patented the first

non-poisonous match in the United States,

and their goal has been to make the safest matches possible.

- This is where all the process begins.

The logs that you see on the dock here,

this would be about one day's production.

- [Narrator] They use aspen because it's strong, straight,

easy to machine, and most importantly, it burns well.

- This is called the bull chain.

And the bull chain is what brings the logs into the plant

and starts the debarking process.

The logs are all about a hundred inches long.

They're debarked, and then we cut 'em into lengths

of about 24 to 25 inches.

- [Narrator] The logs are loaded into a steam bin

to loosen the fibers and kill bacteria.

- The next thing they do is go to the lathe

which starts the veneering process.

- [Narrator] A rotary lathe spins the wood,

while a wide blade peels the log into long, flat sheets.

The operator feeds stacks of sheets into a chopper.

Here, the sheets are cut into splints.

The chopper uses two connected sets of blades

and cuts like a high-speed double guillotine.

The splints are now matchsticks.

Diamond wants them to burn, but not for too long.

If the wood creates an ember,

it could start a fire when tossed out.

So, Diamond runs them through a bath

of monoammonium phosphate.

The wood will still catch fire, but when it's blown out,

the timbers die almost immediately.

Once dry, the splints are pressed together

to face the same direction.

This gets them ready to be forced into a chain.

- What's happening behind us is the splint,

the wooden stick, is getting set in a hole

on this chain above us.

- Misshapen and broken splints fall out and are discarded.

The next step is to put on the match head.

Old match heads contained chemicals that made both

maker and user sick.

Today it's dipped into a non-poisonous mix

containing potassium chlorate and sulfur.

The match is complete, but there's one more safety measure.

The chemicals in the head won't light

unless they're run across a rough surface

containing red phosphorus.

Diamond prints this material right onto its boxes.

Loaded into the boxes, the matches are ready for shipping.

- [Rick] We produce approximately 38

million matches a day.

The number of matches that we produce a year,

we've figured out if you line 'em up end to end,

they would go round to earth at the equator about 11 times.

- [Narrator] That's 273,917 miles

of matches every year.

From the tiny to the mighty.

Trees come in all shapes and sizes.

- In the United States alone,

there's over 1200 different species of tree.

On a worldwide basis, some people will go as high

as 40 to 50,000 different species of trees.

Oak alone, there's 200 different species of oak.

Trees have adapted to nature in a thousand different ways,

and we've taken those characteristics and

used those trees to adapt to our needs.

- [Narrator] Our greatest adaptation of wood

could be when we peel it.

Put the layers back together and you've got plywood.

At Oregon State University,

they've spent a century figuring out how to get

the most from wood.

- Wood can be peeled out like this,

but the grain is still going in this direction.

You can make use of that by taking wood in this direction,

but then plying it with wood that you turn 90 degrees,

and put them together like this,

and it's like a steel-belted radial.

You end up having strength going in alternating planes

that gives the wood strength not only in this direction,

downward, but also laterally,

which you wouldn't get in wood naturally.

- [Narrator] Don't think of plywood as made

from leftover scraps.

It's more like a composite material.

- Plywood is a good example of us emulating

wood's natural strength and actually taking advantage

of it and doing one better.

- [Narrator] Humans have been gluing layers

of wood together since ancient times,

especially when wood was scarce.

- The Egyptians created their own form of plywood.

They would just slice wood very thin, alternate the layers,

and they used it for a lot of the things found in the tombs.

- [Narrator] But modern plywood came about in the 1800s

with the invention of a rotary lathe.

It spins the log while a blade peels it into thin layers,

like unrolling paper towels.

This lathe can turn a large log into a mile-long

piece of ply.

The greatest plywood construction of all time

was an enormous boat that could fly.

It was the brainchild of the eccentric genius,

Howard Hughes.

He called it the Hercules,

but it's better known by a nickname Hughes hated.

The Spruce Goose.

Hughes did nothing halfway, and the Spruce Goose

was pure Hughes.

Today it's housed in Oregon's Evergreen Aviation Museum.

- The aircraft is the largest in the world by wingspan,

and it's 319 feet and 11 inches.

It's about 80 some feet tall,

weighs about 300,000 pounds,

and could carry another hundred thousand pounds.

- [Narrator] Its wings are about the length

of a football field and was over 10 times bigger

than the Army's main troop transport plane, the C-47.

Hughes began work on the Spruce Goose in 1942.

During World War II, German U-boats were sinking

so many ships, the US was afraid of sending out

troop transports.

Hughes' goal? Fly over the U-boats.

He sent out to build a plane that could carry

750 fully equipped men,

but U-boats weren't the only obstacles Hughes faced.

- He was told he could not use strategic materials

such as aluminum or magnesium, so on,

because those were being used for fighters and bombers.

So he was forced to look at other sources of material,

and wood was a major available source for doing this.

- [Narrator] Hughes assembled a team of engineers

and furniture makers.

They used plies of wood peeled from birch trees

and molded the layers.

They called it Duramold.

- Everything you see in here from front to back

to the tip of the tail is Duramold,

which is made out of birch wood.

Everything here is wood. [knuckles rapping]

- [Narrator] Some sections were paper thin,

while others were as thick as beams.

Once the plane was glued together,

they pulled out the nails,

all eight tons of them.

Just about the only metal is in the engines

and hydraulic and electrical systems.

Critics had a field day lampooning the project

as the flying lumber yard and questioning if it

could even take off.

But in 1947, Hughes had the last laugh.

He brought the press along for what he said

would just be a test of the engines.

- So he took the aircraft out, fired it up,

and he asked his co-pilot for 10 degrees of flaps.

- [Announcer] More throttle!

It's 60!

It's about 65!

It's 70!

- He hit 70 miles an hour.

The airplane took off just as advertised.

- [Announcer] And I believe we are airborne.

We are airborne, ladies and gentlemen.

We are really up in the air.

- [Narrator] Vindicated, Hughes built a special hanger

for the plane and spent a million dollars every year

to keep it flight ready.

It was a monument to both his genius and his eccentricity.

- It is also a monument to wood because of the fact

that the Duramold had incredible strength.

We measure it every month and the wings haven't sagged

even a 16th of an inch in 10 years.

- [Narrator] Any way you slice it,

there's only one material that can just about do it all.

Wood.

- There's wood in some pretty unexpected places.

A lot of people think of it as something

that's old- fashioned,

but it's been with us every step of the way

from mankind's step outta the cradle of civilization

right up through today.

- [Narrator] Strong enough to pile drive,

flexible enough to bend,

and light enough to fly.

Wood is one of the most multifaceted materials we have,

making it a modern marvel.

[crowd cheering]