50 Fun Facts About Wood

Howard Hughes's flying boat, mocked as the Spruce Goose, was built almost entirely of which wood?

Birch was chosen because wartime rules kept aluminum for other aircraft, so Hughes had the wood moulded into shape instead. The giant plane made only one brief flight, in 1947.

Which type of saw descends from a device Scottish doctors devised in the 1780s to ease childbirth?

Chainsaw ancestors were fine serrated chains drawn back and forth between two wooden handles to cut through bone. One was pictured in a 1785 textbook on midwifery.

Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific in 1947 on Kon-Tiki, a raft of nine trunks of which light wood?

Balsa is the Spanish word for raft, and the tree's wood is the softest ever measured on the standard hardness test. Botanists class it as a hardwood all the same.

Which US president's false teeth, long said to be wooden, were really made of ivory, brass and gold?

George Washington had a single natural tooth left on the day he was first sworn in. He owned at least four sets of dentures, and none of them contained any wood.

Which popular ice cream flavour can be made artificially from the waste liquor of wood pulp mills?

Vanilla flavouring made from paper-mill waste took over the market in the 1930s. By 1981 a single mill in Ontario supplied 60 percent of the world's synthetic version.

Which Italian city rests on closely packed tree trunks driven down through mud into hard clay?

Venice was founded on trunks of alder, a wood noted for resisting water. Slabs of Istrian limestone were laid across the tops of the piles to carry the buildings.

Bamboo is used like timber for floors and furniture, but it belongs to which group of plants?

Grasses include the giant bamboos, whose stalks can grow more than 40 metres long. Some species are among the fastest-growing plants on Earth.

Which South American country is named after a tree whose wood gave European cloth makers a red dye?

Brazil takes its name from brazilwood, pau-brasil in Portuguese, a name probably linked to a word for glowing embers. Europe's cloth trade had previously imported such dyewood from India at great cost.

Which British World War II warplane was nicknamed the Wooden Wonder for its mostly timber airframe?

Mosquito wings and fuselages were built by a group of twenty furniture companies. That put cabinetmakers to work whose skills the war effort was otherwise leaving idle.

Which light, shock-resistant wood, rubbed with linseed oil, is the classic choice for cricket bats?

Willow of one particular white variety can take a fast delivery without denting or splintering, yet stays light to swing. The handle spliced into it is cane.

By US law, bourbon whiskey sold in America must be stored in a new container made of which wood?

Oak barrels can hold bourbon only once, so most are then sold to distillers in Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean to age other spirits.

Which aromatic wood became the favourite for pencils because it sharpens without splintering?

Cedar ran so short in the early twentieth century that pencil makers recycled old fences and barns to get it. A substitute species was later dyed and perfumed to pass for the original.

Before plastics took over, the black keys of a piano were traditionally made from which dense wood?

Ebony black keys once sat beside white keys covered in strips of ivory. With ivory-yielding animals now protected by treaty, piano makers use plastics almost exclusively.

Indoor basketball courts, including the NBA's floors, are usually made of which polished wood?

Maple from the same species that is tapped for syrup is tough enough for bowling too. Both the lanes and the pins are commonly made from it.

Which springy wood was long the standard for baseball bats, after heavy hickory fell from favour?

Ash let hitters swing faster than hickory, whose weight slows a bat down. Babe Ruth's bat pattern is still kept in the Louisville Slugger archives as model R43.

In Carlo Collodi's story, which poor Tuscan craftsman carves the wooden puppet Pinocchio from a log?

Geppetto is given the log by a carpenter, Master Antonio, who had meant to turn it into a table leg. The newly carved puppet's first act is to laugh in his maker's face.

Which giant lumberjack of North American folklore is accompanied by a blue ox named Babe?

Paul Bunyan was merely very tall and strong in the earliest tales. A writer named William Laughead later made him tower over the trees, and also gave the ox its name.

Which Aboriginal Australian instrument is traditionally made from a trunk hollowed by termites?

Didgeridoo makers search for trees in termite country, then knock on the peeled trunk to hear whether the hollow resonates. The insects eat only the dead centre of a living tree.

Which percussion instrument takes its name from the Ancient Greek words for wood and sound?

Xylophone bars have to be wooden for the name to fit. Toy versions with metal bars are, strictly speaking, glockenspiels.

Which lightweight black fuel is made by strongly heating wood with very little oxygen?

Charcoal is mostly carbon, because the heat drives off the wood's water and other volatile parts. It was widely used in place of coke for smelting in blast furnaces.

Which natural polymer, making up 20 to 35 percent of dry wood, stiffens the cell walls of trees?

Lignin lends rigidity and does not rot easily, which helps timber last. Paper mills work hard to remove it, and pulp that keeps some of it comes out brownish.

Which term names the inner wood of a trunk, made decay-resistant by a natural chemical change?

Heartwood is named only for its position, not because the tree relies on it. The living sapwood around it does the work of carrying water up from the roots.

A knot in a plank of wood marks the spot where which part of the tree once grew?

A branch that dies low on the trunk is slowly swallowed by later layers of growth, sealing its base inside. Knots weaken a board under tension but are often shown off for their looks.

Planing against which feature, the lengthwise run of a board's fibres, leaves a torn surface?

Grain mostly follows the length of the trunk, since that is how the tree's fibres grew. One wood scientist called it a confusingly versatile term, because the word is used in so many senses.

Freshly cut timber that has not yet had time to dry out is described by which colour?

Green timber still holds its natural moisture, so it gives off less heat as firewood. Part of the fire's energy is spent turning that water to vapour.

Which simple alcohol earned the nickname wood alcohol because it was once made by distilling timber?

Methanol was first isolated in pure form by Robert Boyle in 1661, when he distilled it from boxwood. It is more acutely toxic than the alcohol found in drinks.

Which metal did Humphry Davy name after the burnt-wood residue that had long supplied its salts?

Potassium comes from potash, the residue left when burnt wood was soaked in a pot and the water boiled away. Its symbol K comes from kali, which traces back to an Arabic term for the same burnt plant remains.

Which fabric, once sold as artificial silk, is made from cellulose taken from wood pulp?

Rayon was the first commercial semi-synthetic fibre, pioneered by the French industrialist Hilaire de Chardonnet. It is also called viscose, after the thick solution used to make it.

Which US state is home to Petrified Forest National Park, where Triassic logs have turned to stone?

Arizona's fossil trees fell about 225 million years ago. Buried in wet sediment with little oxygen, they decayed so slowly that minerals, mostly silica, took the place of the wood.

Which panel is made of thin wood sheets glued together, each turned at right angles to the next?

Plywood takes its name from the French verb plier, to fold. Crossing the layers stops a panel splitting when it is nailed near the edge, and keeps it from swelling and shrinking.

Which joint of interlocking wedge-shaped fingers commonly fixes the sides of a drawer to the front?

Dovetail joints resist being pulled apart, which is the strain a drawer front takes every time it is opened. Some of the earliest known examples are in furniture from Egypt's First Dynasty tombs.

Which craftsman makes wooden casks and barrels from staves that are heated or steamed to bend them?

Cooper survives as a surname taken from the trade, and a workshop where casks are made is still called a cooperage. The word goes back to the Latin cupa, meaning a tun or barrel.

Which glossy wood finish is made from a resin secreted by tiny bugs on trees in India and Thailand?

Shellac also went into gramophone records until vinyl replaced it. Estimates of how many bugs it takes to produce a single kilogram run from 50,000 to 300,000.

Which wood was the preferred material for the English longbow, the weapon that won Agincourt?

Yew grew so scarce that a 1472 law made every ship docking in England bring four bowstaves for each tun of cargo. Richard III later raised the quota to ten.

Which Jamaican and Bahamian wood became the favourite of 18th-century British furniture makers?

Mahogany trees grow to such a girth that they yield very wide boards, which suited fine cabinetry. The timber is also valued for boats and musical instruments.

Which tropical hardwood's natural oils make it a classic choice for boat decks and garden furniture?

Teak stays durable even without oil or varnish, and its own oils keep termites away. Nearly half of the world's naturally occurring supply grows in Myanmar's forests.

In Genesis, the ark built to survive the Flood is made from which timber, named nowhere else in the Bible?

Gopher wood is left untranslated in the King James Version because nobody is sure which tree was meant. Many modern English translations settle on cypress.

The block-stacking game Jenga takes its name from a word meaning to build in which African language?

Swahili was a childhood language of the game's British creator, Leslie Scott, who was born in what is now Tanzania. Her family's first set of blocks came from a sawmill in Ghana.

Golf clubs called woods once had heads of which hardwood, from a tree also grown for orange fruit?

Persimmon heads gave way to hollow titanium and other metals after the first stainless model appeared in 1976. The clubs kept their old name even though no timber is left in them.

Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in oil, not on canvas, but on a panel of which pale wood?

Poplar reacts to humidity, and the unrestrained panel warped until a crack ran from its top edge down to the sitter's hairline. Two butterfly-shaped braces were later set into the back.

Which term names the narrow channel a saw blade leaves behind, and also the width of that channel?

Kerf adds up fast. Cut an eight-foot board into one-foot lengths with an eighth of an inch lost at each cut, and the last piece comes out seven-eighths of an inch short.

The Janka test rates wood hardness by the force needed to push which object halfway into a sample?

A steel ball about eleven millimetres across is pressed in until half of it is buried. Flooring sellers quote the result to show how well a species will stand up to dents and wear.

Wooden beams about 476,000 years old were found at Kalambo Falls, on Tanzania's border with which country?

Zambia's find is older than our own species, so an earlier human relative must have shaped the logs. Two of them had been worked so that they interlock, perhaps as a platform beside the water.

Grinling Gibbons carved his airy garlands for Windsor Castle and Hampton Court mostly in which wood?

Limewood let Gibbons give carving what Horace Walpole described as the loose, airy lightness of flowers. A wreath he carved from it now marks his own burial place in Covent Garden.

Which wood resists splitting so well that it was a traditional choice for wheel hubs and chair seats?

Elm also resists decay when it is kept permanently wet, so hollowed trunks served as medieval Europe's water pipes. The piers of the original London Bridge were made of it too.

The kraft process for pulping wood into paper is named after a German and Swedish word meaning what?

Strength was what set the new paper apart. A Swedish mill manager processed a batch that had been stopped too early by mistake, and found the result tougher than any paper then known.

Which traditional woodland practice cuts a tree down to a stump so that fresh shoots regrow from it?

Coppicing leaves living stumps called stools, which can be cropped again and again. Pollarding is the same idea carried out higher up the trunk, beyond the reach of grazing animals.

Which dense wood sinks in water and once lined the propeller shaft bearings of ships?

Lignum vitae is self-lubricating, which is why John Harrison also used it for the bearings and gears of his clocks. Its Latin name means wood of life, after the resin's use as a medicine.

Whose 1983 French Open win was the last men's major singles title won with a wooden racket?

Yannick Noah was the first Frenchman in 37 years to win the title. Wooden frames had to stay small to remain stiff enough to hold the strings, a limit that composite rackets removed.

Which resin-soaked wood, formed when mould infects Aquilaria trees, yields the perfume scent oud?

Agarwood forms only as a defence, when the tree floods its infected core with dark, fragrant resin. Before the infection that core is pale and has almost no scent.