Today, June 4, 2020, marks 110 years since the doors opened at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) and a world of possibility opened with them.
Original FPL building, 1910-1931
FPL headquarters, 1931
FPL’s Cenennial Research Facility, 2010
We could never summarize in one blog post all the incredible advances in the world of wood that have occurred since then. In fact, FPL has produced more than 20,000 publications over the years, all of which are available to anyone who finds them useful, be they fellow researchers, industry partners, or homeowners with a project to tackle. (Many are digitized here.)
In celebration of 110 years of research at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), we are revisiting blog posts that detail some of our most interesting historic people, places, and projects. Enjoy!
In the 1950s, FPL researchers were challenged with how to use waste wood as flooring.
During the wood flooring manufacturing process, many of the cut pieces were too short to be used as conventional flooring, so researchers demonstrated ways of combining short pieces of wood into designs that could be installed in decorative ways, just like tiles.
In celebration of 110 years of research at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), we are revisiting blog posts that detail some of our most interesting historic people, places, and projects. Enjoy!
FPL’s pioneering work on the engineering design of glued-laminated construction helped launch the laminating industry in the United States. Much of the research on laminated wood originated at the time of the first World War when the Bureau of Aircraft Production approached FPL with a need for lightweight airplane wings.
In celebration of 110 years of research at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), we are revisiting blog posts that detail some of our most interesting historic people, places, and projects. Enjoy!
Between 1931 and 1932, a new home for FPL was designed and built about a mile west from its first long-term home on the University of Wisconsin (UW) campus. On a site situated adjacent to UW, in the middle of a corn field, the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird and Root planned a design for the state-of-the-art laboratory.
The newly constructed Forest Products Laboratory rose up out of the countryside to the west of the University of Wisconsin.
According to A History of the Architecture of the USDA Forest Service, Building One on the FPL campus “typifies the American Perpendicular or Modernistic phase of the Art Deco style as it was applied to commercial design.” The building is a stand-alone structure of steel and concrete and has a U-shaped plan.
Ants Macro on Green Leaves, Naypong Studio – stock.adobe.com
Agriculture is widely considered the start of humanity living in large, closely inhabited settlements as opposed to small nomadic tribes. With any behavioral change, there is a cost-benefit. We are currently experiencing a real-time cost-benefit of living in an agricultural society with the development of the coronavirus pandemic. Social living has increased humanity’s ability to do just about everything including pathogen (bacterium, virus, disease causing microorganism) transmission.
However, humanity is not the only agricultural society successfully living on Earth today. If we look closely—very closely—there are tiny, yet massively populated societies facing the same pathogen transmission challenges.
Some of these societies have developed unique strategies to protect themselves—like a certain species of aphids whose soldiers explode their abdomens to seal and defend their colony from disease threats.
Others employ versions that we see in human communities, like developing a diverse gut microbiome for strong immune systems.
Taking a closer look at social insect models could be the key to unlocking more effective human strategies for pathogen management.
