Wood: from Raw Material to Cultural Material

Wood is a perfect example of a material that has been known to man since the beginning of cultural history and that, in every epoch, has been part of the development of cultural and productive processes, emphasizing the role of widespread innovation in the construction of social relationships and economic organizations. The constant tension between the needs connected with its use, the scarcity of the resource and the intrinsic limitation of the material provide the basic premises for the process of emancipation of wood from its original conditions to its final contribution to the industrial dimension. Inevitably, the beginning of this history has to coincide with the period of the industrial revolution. Between 1790 and 1890 a great many woodworking machines were patented, and served to mechanize processes that had heretofore been exclusively manual. The process of technological innovation had its start in Europe, particularly in England, but later expanded and became widespread in the United States. The sector that was first to use machinery in its production processes was not that of furniture, however, but shipbuilding. Indeed, a naval engineer by the name of Sir Samuel Bentham was the first to invent a planing machine, which he patented in 1791, but it was only the first in a long series of inventions in the field of wood processing. This simple tool answered the need to resolve the problem of the uneven surface of the material, opening the way to the development of modular parts, which were able to respond to the first law of industrialization: uniformity of size and shape