In 1797 Samuel
Bentham applied for patents covering several machines to
produce veneers. In his patent applications, he described the concept of
laminating several layers of veneer with glue to form a thicker piece – the
first description of what we now call plywood. Samuel Bentham was a
British naval engineer with many shipbuilding inventions to his credit. Veneers
at the time of Bentham were flat sawn, rift sawn or quarter sawn;
i.e. cut along or across the log manually in different angles to the grain and
thus limited in width and length.
About fifty years later Immanuel
Nobel, father of Alfred Nobel,
realized that several thinner layers of wood bonded together would be stronger
than one single thick layer of wood. Understanding the industrial
potential of laminated wood he invented rotary lathe.
There is little record of the early
implementation of rotary lathe and the subsequent commercialization of plywood
as we know it today. But in its 1870 edition, the French dictionary describes
the process of rotary lathe veneer manufacturing in its entry Déroulage. One
can thus presume that rotary lathe plywood manufacturer was an established
process in France in the 1860s. Plywood was introduced into the United States
in 1865 and industrial production started shortly after. In 1928, the
first standard-sized 4 ft by 8 ft (1.2 m by 2.4 m) plywood sheets
were introduced in the United States for use as a general building material.