Wooden plywood - flexible plywood made of sheets of wood

Plywood is a panel made by gluing an odd number of sheets of veneer, arranged perpendicular to each other. Plywood panels are used in both the furniture and construction industries, as plywood is much more dimensionally stable than a similar timber panel. Plywood also cracks much more slowly when nailed and has the same strength both horizontally and vertically.

When and how did the plywood appear?

In 1797, Samuel Bentham, a British naval engineer with many inventions in his field, applied for a patent for several veneer cutting machines. In the patent applications, he describes obtaining a product by gluing together several veneers, which is in fact the first description of what is now plywood. At that time, veneers were obtained in gantries, only by flat-cutting from logs of sheets of wood.

Fifty years later, Immanuel Nobel, Alfred Nobel's father, sees the industrial potential of the new material. He realises that such a multi-layered product will have superior strength to plywood and invents a machine (a lathe) to produce the veneer by unrolling the log, the veneer that forms the basis of today's plywood.
There is little information on the early uses of the lathe. In the 1870 edition of the French dictionary Le Robert there appears, however, a description of the veneer production by scrolling. It can therefore be assumed that the process reached France around 1860. In the USA, plywood arrived in 1865 and very soon industrial production began. Since 1925, different types of plywood have also been used in construction.

Wood plywood was used in the construction of WWII fighter planes

Plywood comes in many varieties: light wood plywood, hardwood plywood, tropical wood plywood, flexible plywood, decorative plywood, shipbuilding plywood and aircraft plywood.

Aircraft plywood is produced from veneer of mahon and/or birch, bonded with highly heat and moisture resistant adhesive. Such plywood was used for the construction of fighter planes in World War II.

The most famous was the British Mosquito bomber also called The Wooden Wonder (Wooden wonder). Photo

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