In gilding, a thin layer of gold covers an object of base material to give the appearance of a solid gold object. Plywood originated in much the same way. With fine woods in short supply in Egypt around 3500 B.C.E., it became necessary to find alternative solutions to the demands of high-quality furniture making. One such solution involved taking thin sheets of decorative woods and glueing them to thicker pieces of low- quality wood. This is believed to have been done purely for cosmetic and economic reasons, but the process also brings about improvements to the physical properties of the resulting hybrid wood.
Since the days of Egyptian plywood, the material has maintained its place in popular design, as illustrated by its use in the stylish furniture .of Gerrit Rietveld, Marcel Breuer, and Alvar Aalto.-Unlike the designers of 5,000 years ago, however, these men were aware that the plywood items' they were producing would offer greater resistance to unwanted flexing. The composite wood is rigid because the grain of each successive layer is set at an angle of ninety degrees to the layer to which it is glued.
Stumbling across furniture in the middle of the night with the lights turned out can be a painful experience. Fortunately for the Egyptian carpenters, their stumbling in the dark was metaphorical and it involved stumbling across the superior strengths of plywood furniture rather than the furniture itself. In fact, the applications of plywood are by no means limited to furniture; it finds its way into building construction, the hulls of boats, shelves, and automobiles. However, it was only with the advancements in adhesives during the twentieth century that all of these uses have been practical.
