Interview with Andrew Baker (part 1 of 2)

LB: Today is Monday, February 11, 2008, and Lauren Benditt of the University of Wisconsin Oral History Program will be interviewing Andy Baker about his experiences at the Forest Products Lab. The interview will include segments regarding what he did before coming to the Forest Products Lab, his experiences at the Forest Products Lab, projects he found to be of particular interest, and other thoughts he has about the Lab.

LB: So, I guess we're going to start the interview with some questions about what led you to come here. Would you like to talk about your education and what made you interested in forest products?

AB: Okay, I went to university at Eau Claire for two years and then transferred 00:01:00down here as a junior in chemical engineering. And that was [in] 1953 for two and a half years. And those days it took [about] four and a half years to get a chemical engineering degree. Chemical engineers had a summer program, and it took six weeks. I was married at the time, and we would go back up to Stanley, Wisconsin. And I used to work up there [during] the summer. I had to stay down here for [the] six weeks, the summer chemical engineering course. It was a 00:02:00required course.

And while I was there, the chairman of the department Professor Ragits knew I was going to be here in the summertime. And he told me I could probably get a job here at the Forest Products Laboratory. And before I knew it, he had called over here, and then [in] a week one of the chemical engineers over here visited with me at the laboratory campus. His name was Jack Harris, [a] chemical engineer, in the wood chemistry [department]. So, [that's how] I got a job over here.

LB: Was that in the middle of your education or at the very end?

AB: At the end. The summer course [went] for six weeks, and then there was a vacant spot for summer. And I had to go one more semester after that. So, I worked here in the summertime and learned quite a few things from Jerry Saeman, who was a chemist. I learned a little bit about glass blowing and making things with glass. And part of the project was to make test tubes and put material in there, wood, and then and an acid, and then seal it up. So I learned how to make 00:04:00test tubes seal up.

And I was working on the hydrolysis of wood to make sugars at that time and looking at the kinetics of the, of the rate of sugars cellulose degrading in to sugars with various, various amounts of sulfuric acid in the water. The acid was the, the material that would break [down] the cellulose down into the sugars. Unfortunately, when it does that, the acid also degrades the sugars into 00:05:00something that you didn't want. And so they, the best thing to do would be [to treat at] a very high [hydrolysis] pressure, high temperature hydrolysis with the acid on the wood. And then at those temperatures the wood goes, cellulose goes a little bit faster, then the sugars [degrade to byproducts]. So you do gain something out of it. And we were looking at the kinetics of the whole system.

So we would make little reactors [in] a test tube, sealed up and put it in a temperature--well, we called it a, it was a pressurized system, a steam jacket on the outside to get heat on the inside. And if you do that carefully and 00:06:00reduce the pressure at the end of the, whatever time you wanted it the test tubes would not break or explode. And then we would take the, the liquid out of there and have the liquid tested for sugars, wood sugars.

LB: That's really interesting.

AB: And then I learned how to do that. And then when school started again in September, I worked here for,for four hours a week I guess. and I got paid for part of that time, and the rest was, was [considered as] a project for my 00:07:00chemical engineering course.

LB: Great.

AB: And so and I brought a friend over here with me, also a chemical engineer, and we worked together on this project until we graduated.

LB: And who was that?

AB: [Gene] Krcmar. K-R-C-M-A-R--so, he's Eastern European background and that's why the name is like it is. Not all the letters are there.

LB: Yeah, well that makes it easier to spell.

AB: Yes.

LB: So you actually came to Forest Products Lab before finishing your degree.

AB: Oh yes.

LB: And then did you just continue on here after you completed your degree?

AB: When I graduated [pause] in the, that would be 1956. I quit the job here and my wife and I and the baby moved back up to Stanley and at that time I was going on visiting various companies to see if I wanted to work there and see if they wanted me. And I hadn't made up my mind yet. We moved up there and a week later I called Dr. [Edward] Locke who was a chemical engineer working here as the wood chemistry chief. And I called him on a Saturday morning and he said well you can 00:09:00start Monday. So that was it. He had, he had wanted me to come here before that too I hadn't made up my mind yet so we moved back down in about two weeks. And lived [near] here, a block away from the Laboratory [at Kendall Ave].

LB: That's very convenient.

AB: Yes.

LB: And I guess to just go back a little bit had you heard about the Forest Products Lab before you started working here that one summer?

AB: No, no.

LB: Okay so you didn't know anything about what was--n?

AB: No. I had no idea at all.

LB: Okay great. Well maybe we can sort of, I know that you've already discussed what you did during the summer, but how was your first day on the job once you 00:10:00started working here full time?

AB: Oh boy.

LB: After graduation.

AB: My first day as a--before I graduated--it was a hot summer and I came to work on that Monday as a student and Wednesday it was so hot that we were all allowed to go home.

And it was hot where we lived and I ended up at Paisan's in the afternoon. And my wife had worked there so we knew each other down there. That was my first day that I, I can remember being here as a student. Then coming back after graduation I don't think I can remember what I did right away. But it had to do 00:11:00with the same project that I was working on. And I guess I can't answer any more of, about that.

LB: No, that's fine. Do have any thoughts on a typical day here? Was it mostly spent in the lab or writing?

AB: Mostly laboratory work. I had my own area up on the third floor and I had a desk in another laboratory and I had space to work on my own, along with Jack Harris and Jerry Saeman.

LB: And so you already talked about your first project, how long did you work on 00:12:00that or did you transition onto other projects quickly?

AB: Trying to remember what I did do the first year. Had to do with the wood hydrolysis for making wood sugars and alcohol. Then we had a military project that I was working with and that was to [make glycerin from wood].

LB: That's, that's fine.

AB: One of the projects was to make glycerin from wood, wood sugars, and at that time glycerin was made [as a byproduct of] making soap and about that time were making detergents from, instead of a lot of soap and the military wanted another process for making glycerin because glycerin was used in making ammunitions, and there was no synthetic way to make glycerin at that time. But about two years into that project, a company did, I think it was Shell, revise the system to make glycerin synthetically. And that sort of ended the project, and we 00:14:00couldn't, we could make the glycerin but we also made some other things with it and we had trouble to separate the glycerin from what you don't want. And that was a real problem that we couldn't work on we couldn't, couldn't dissolve it. And that was--

Jack Harris and I went to a chemical engineers meeting in Seattle and while we were out there we went to the, visited [the Pacific] Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station and, in Portland. And Ed Locke used to work there and the 00:15:00director of the Laboratory also had worked [there], at Portland. And Ed Locke arranged for Jack and I to takes the tours into the [wood research laboratories] out there by the direct, by the, one of these projects at the at the Portland station his name was Elmer Metzen and he was a forester and he had two other people working with him, a civil engineer and another forester. And he took us through the woods and I think I impressed him because I knew the, how to identify species of trees. The trees out there were different but they looked just like some of the trees here in the Midwest and we spent I think three, four 00:16:00days with them and went through Oregon quite a ways into the forests go out and watch big trees getting cut down, going to the saw mills [and wood research laboratories], see how they worked and, Elmer and I got to be, I think, pretty (good) friends. He had a son just about my age also.

And then I came, we came back and and that military project money was going to be gone, Ed Locke knew that something was going to happen, and he asked me if I wanted to go to Portland, Oregon for two years. And that was Christmastime when we got out there. And that was quite a change to go from this area here to where 00:17:00it rained every day. I think the first week we, the first two weeks we were there it rained every day. But it was warm and the, you didn't get wet, it was raining but you didn't seem to get wet--small drips, drops of water. So I ended up out there and worked on various project out there.

The station group that I was in, there were four of us then, and one of them, the forester, was running experiments at sawmills to determine how much lumber you get out of a log of a certain size, and a certain grade. Very good, very high grade logs that to, very poor logs and what we'd do is measure the diameter 00:18:00of the log and the length and then run it through the sawmill and measure all the [lumber] that came out, the lumber, by thickness, width, and length and, and by grade of the log. My I, I think there were three or four grades of the logs coming out of the woods, and that's how they determined what the value of that log was. And we'd look at the lumber and the lumber would be graded at the saw mill, anyway we would then measure, have the grade of the lumber and the size of the lumber and the volume of the lumber. And turns out that about half of the wood was sawdust. That still is the case. So then [we] also did it [for] 00:19:00plywood, making cutting logs but rotate makes the veneer the long piece, and then that's cut into the sizes to make plywood. And you would expect that when you're not sawing it you would get more lumber out of it, or good wood out of it, but it's not the case because you loose a lot in the trimming of the,of the veneer. And about the same amount is wasted and used for fuel. And the rest was made into plywood.

That was one of the major--that information was used by the Forest Service to 00:20:00determine the value of logs at they found in the woods. They would go through the forest and measure each tree and estimate what the grade of the lumber, or of the log is and that would determine what the value of that the [log sale]. Douglas Fir at that time was clear cut, so they would clear cut maybe a forty acres a time depending on the terrain. And after 23 months I came back here, from Portland.

LB: And, and that was because you were supposed to come back after two years?

AB: Ed Locke arranged it that I would come back two years.

LB: And what year was that?

AB: We left, got to Portland [pause], let's see, ['57] and came back before 1960. So that, we came back in October two years later.

LB: So '57 to '60 or?

AB: ['59].

LB: Oh okay. ['57 to '59]. and so another question about while you were in Portland, it sounds like you were doing sort of wood projects research that wasn't really related to chemistry.

AB: Right. But there were other things to do. And one of them was, this was the, trying to remember the name of the project I was in, the effort with the, that, except for the sawmill work we did. It had to do with taking information from the Forest Products Laboratory to the industry in in Washington and Ari, and 00:22:00Cali, or Washington and Oregon. And so we did visit a lot of sawmills and a lot of loggers. It was interesting to go to some mills like, make shake wood for roofing and [veneer for] plywood plants. And I was the youngest person there and the group I was in if somebody wanted from [the Forest Products Lab] , or somebody from industry wanted to come and see the industries in Oregon and Washington, they would come to the Pacific Northwest Station and they would come 00:23:00into our group and we would take them on tours.

Quite a few people from the Laboratory here came out every once in a while to do various things and since I was the youngest one there I had to drive the car. So I got to travel all of Oregon and Washington and a lot of the people coming in were foreigners too, from Africa, and England or Europe, Australia.. That was interesting because I got all around all the time. Quite a few people wanted to go through the Weyerhaeuser sawmills at Longview, Washington. And in the summertime they had tour guides, who were college students and they would take us through and I was there going through there so often that when I went there 00:24:00after the students were gone they would let me be the tour guide. And so I would take them. They, you know get a hard hat and take them out into the sawmills, all by myself, you know. That was interesting that they would allow me to do that--couldn't do it now.

LB: And how did that compare for you with working in a lab? It seems like a very different.

AB: Oh it is, it was but it was I was learning things mean I lot about the industry. And there were particleboard plants out there too and that. We had other projects out there too one was to put thermacouples in the, in the timber 00:25:00of a house and measure it, see how hot it would get in the summertime. Then we had those thermocouples in there and go out there every so often and measure the temperature of the roof rafters and the plywood and send that back here because the heat degrades the plywood, and sometimes quite bad.

LB: So were you still working pretty regularly with people who were back here?

AB: Yes. Yeah this, there [are other] stations like that, I think six or seven, there was one Midwest, Southeast, Northeast mid-states Colorado, and California. 00:26:00So it was a nice group of people and we, they would come here the project leader, each of those [project leaders] would come here to the Lab once a year and get information that was developed here they could use in the field.

LB: I guess, do you have any other particular memories of your time in Portland as compared to your time here?

AB: No all together different. And people in the station there were mostly foresters and economists. They have an economist group here too.

LB: It seems like an interesting combination in Portland, foresters and the economists.

AB: Well the Forest Service wanted to know what the market is lumber is it going to go up or down and they wanted to know how much money the Forest Service could get from the logs that are hauled off. They would hire a contractor to take the logs out of the, rather the contractor would buy the logs, pay the Forest Service and then they'd go cut it. So that's where the economists come in.

LB: So how was it coming back? After your time doing something completely different.

AB: Well, I thought, I enjoyed being out there. And the weather was nice I thought you'd have to decide whether you want to go to the ocean or the mountains and we did a lot of traveling like that. We also had another girl at that time, while we were out there. And it was quite a change. You couldn't hang the diapers on the outside because it was raining all the time. And so, we did buy a clothes dryer. And,it was just pleasant except not so much in the summertime but I think we had, one year we had three months with no rain in 00:29:00Portland and then we had a tenth of an inch. So every day was sunny it had gotten monotonous and here you get a thunderstorm, and you get clouds. And out there, in the summertime, there was no thunder, no lightening except in the mountains. And in Portland I, only once or twice was there thunder or lightening. Well I had other, we used to take trips and to technical meetings and these people in, around with the country would come out there to a meeting and one time we'd, they all came to Portland and we took, I think it was five of 00:30:00us, I took a car and drove to San Francisco for the meeting and we took three or four days to get down there and stopped at various places on the way. And so I got to see them cut down redwood trees. They would, and haul them and drag them in tie, high laid loggings where they'd have a big boom sticking up and cable going down, and they'd drag the logs in. And the cable would come down and get wound up on a cylinder to pull the log in. And I think they still do that but they don't use, they don't use the high lead anymore [where] they would crawl up the wood [to] the middle of the tree and put the pulley up there, if you can imagine that.

LB: That's got to be a bit scary.

AB: Yes. They were two or three times taller than what you sees a power poll 00:31:00around here so they were pretty good size trees. [Pause] So that got me back here. And then the military project was over and we were still trying to make sugars and to make alcohol. And at that time a barrel of oil in the East, Mid-East, was a dollar a barrel. And you can't make alcohol any cheaper than that. All during World War II, well there was a, a plant in, in Oregon that was 00:32:00trying to make alcohol from wood on a grand scale and the war ended before they could make it go. And so they'd, they never went anyway until I guess the mid '70s, late '70s here, when the, we'd had a oil embargo, fuel embargo, in 1973, and there was more effort to try to make alcohol and the department of energy took on lot of that. Tennessee Valley was working on it and the people who knew the most about it was Jack Harris and Jerry Saeman. And we told [others] that we 00:33:00couldn't do it, but we had to go through the--try to do it and on paper you couldn't do it and make money. But they're still working on it.

LB: Well, might becoming more cost efficient now.

AB: Well, if you're making it from corn you take say ten gallons of petroleum and you might make only eleven gallons of alcohol so you're not, really not getting ahead. You talk about all the alcohol they're making but you know they're spending that much for, almost that much for fuel. So then a little bit 00:34:00later then when this was coming on or wanting to be built or made Tennessee Valley wanted to get into it, they had a facility down there to make fertilizers and so they had a big system nice group of people down there and they wanted to make, make it at their pilot plant and so we helped them width that. I would go down there a couple times a year and they would come here. And finally it just sort of disappeared because you couldn't do it and oil was what twenty gallon, 00:35:00twenty dollars a barrel maybe that was the high point at that time. Now it's a hundred.

So I did work on other projects after that. It was a, a lot of sawdust to be made at the sawmills and we got into the project of how digestible is? How, how could a cow? What kind of wood would the cow use? And we got worked with dairy 00:36:00science department with Larry Satter, who was, I think, the most renowned cow [nutritionist] [pause] he knew more about what, how the cow can eat things and go through their system. They have four stomachs. And so we uh, they have a system where they can put animal feed into a test tube along with liquid from the, the cow's stomach and let it go for about, like twenty-four or forty-eight 00:37:00hours and a system that shake it every once in awhile and then you would measure what disappeared, [is] what the rumen could [digest]. And so we did a lot of studies like that. We found out that Aspen wood was the most digestible, and the bark was very digestible also. And, if you feed hay to a cow it has to be long hay, you can't make it, grind it up, [because] that doesn't make roughage for a cow; it has to long hay, long hay. But we found out that sawdust worked very good as sawdust and could take the place of long hay. And then we, we did animal 00:38:00studies where you would put in all, all long hay and then long hay with some sawdust up to about 30 percent sawdust, and the cows could get along that way. You couldn't get more than about 30 percent sawdust and still have the cow get nutrition. And we had other studies. In a pulp mill, they make fiber to make paper and the process they make a lot of fines, which would be just like sawdust, and that fines was something that they [the pulp mill] couldn't get rid 00:39:00of, and so we started using that as a food for animals. And that worked pretty good except that you couldn't always get pure fines without getting something else into it at the, at the mill.

And I used to go up to Charmin at Green Bay and loads of it, of the saw, the fines. And we fed beef cattle, and cows, and goats. Goats were good because they're smaller, take up less room, and they don't eat as much and it was easier to handle. And we worked on that a couple of years. But then the, when the, in 00:40:001973 when the fuel was embargoed and, they found out that they could burn the sawdust and use it as fuel, and that's the way it ended up. Whereas instead of being a, a lot of sawdust around, there was, it was [nearly] all being burned after that. But we did find out that the animals could tolerate the use of some wood [sawdust]. And there was one feedmill up north that he would find farmers who had cows that didn't give a lot of milk and so they didn't get much money 00:41:00from that cow. So that would, it wasn't worth while to give them good feed so he would put in sawdust and reduce the cost of the feed and still the cows would give milk at lower cost. So you don't want to feed poor milking cows a high grade feed. Its not so good for them anyway if it's high grade feed if they're not getting a lot, giving a lot of milk.

LB: Were there any other projects that you worked on that you found particularly important to you, or particularly significant for you?

AB: Projects? Yes, I was trying to think when the forest products industry was 00:42:00promoting a wood foundation and made with plywood instead of concrete and with two-by-fours or two-by-sixes or something bigger holding that up. And they would have a foundation that was around the outside they would have a lot of gravel in there so the water, water comes down and it would go away and it wouldn't leak in. And sometimes they had piping around there and so they could, make the water run away from the foundation. But what they were going to use for wood, for 00:43:00treated wood was, had copper in it. And I'm trying to think what else is in there but, [for foundations of wood] I looked at the book that the forest industry in Washington put together, and for fasteners they specified corrosion resistant fasteners, and they said one of them was aluminum. And I knew right away what was wrong. I had taken a course in corrosion and if you put aluminum 00:44:00and copper together the aluminum gets corroded but the copper isn't. There's a series of metals where at one time, one on top was very corrosion resistant and one at the bottom is, will corrode rapidly. And if there's one up and one down here [connected together in water], this one here's going to corrode. And there's a whole series of them, in the [corrosion] syntax books. And aluminum is below copper in that series, which means, if you know anything about corrosion, that [the aluminum in that] nail is going to corrode. And it took me, took awhile for me to tell people here that. It was simple to think about; you know 00:45:00what's going to happen before it, you have trouble. So they, the industry didn't go along with it, they kept making foundations with galvanized steel nails. Couple ways to galvanize the steel, one is to electroplate it, make it real shinny and smooth or you can, you can dip it in the zinc, in liquid zinc and coat it that way. And there you get more zinc. But they were using fastening tools, air, air guns and you can't put the [zinc dipper galvanized] nails are 00:46:00put into a belt like a machinegun belt--the galvanized nails are too rough to go through that system. So they used regular electrocoated zinc on it. Well they didn't believe me so I made up some pieces of wood, used, two, I used three different kinds of treated wood and that's what they were using in the industry then. And I put nails in them, block of wood, two pieces of wood and put nails in, four in each piece and I weighed the nails before I put them in and set them up in high-humidity room downstairs and one of about. And lets see, it turns out 00:47:00that if wood is just damp part of the time, you didn't get much corrosion, you have to have the moisture content of the wood above 20 percent. And lumber is kiln dried to about 18 percent. And so you wouldn't get any, much corrosion then.

But I put these blocks in high-humidity room, got well over 90 percent relative humidity, which gave the wood more than 20 percent moisture content. You can look that up in the book if the wood is in high humidity above a certain level you know what the moisture content of the wood is. And once you get it above say 00:48:0025 percent, it's saturated. So, I put them in the humidity room and took them out, some out in one year and I went so far as twelve or fifteen years. I didn't have to go that long, but after one year I, aluminum nail would have what's called pinhole corrosion. It's like you took a pin and poked it through there, made a hole about the diameter of a pin stem and I took pictures of those and showed it to people and then they believed me. But they didn't want to go to 00:49:00stainless steal because it cost too much, they said. But it turns out that if I used silicon bronze, what they use on ships, wood ships, and copper and stainless steel, two kinds of stainless steel, one is good in salt water and one good for ordinary water. And then they believed me and now of course about five years they finally said that they should use stainless steel. And we did inspect houses in Minnesota and in Virginia, homes that were built with a lot, 00:50:00electrocoated nails and you could see corrosion. And one, one of the fellows who came along with us took an x-ray machine and actually took x-rays between the wood and they come out with--just like you'd get an x-ray like this of your body, it had to be that big. And you could see when there was corrosion because there would be, a flame like from the head of the nail out, on the x-ray it looked like a flame, when it was black. And that was one way that we looked at the houses, rather than try to pull the nails out and look at them, we used the 00:51:00x-rays, and that worked very well. [Pause] It, we went to Minneapolis and houses there had a garage in the basement and in the summertime it was humid and they'd leave the garage door open, and you know what would happen, the humidity would go and hit the cold wall on the backside of the house and the nailheads would get wet and cause corrosion. So in the South where it's warm all the time like that, you don't get that cold ground that causes condensation. By the way, you 00:52:00see old barns, they sag in the roof. I, I wrote an article where, I have it with me but, a publication from the Lab here on--I wonder if I brought it (long pause).

LB: That's from corrosion of the?

AB: Yes that's the nail that I found up North on an old machine shed and, that 00:53:00drawing on the front is from that, a board like that, yes. That black is iron, rusting, from a nail. What happens is that the, the iron causes the wood to degrade and because it's, the iron is going out the nail head, the nail stem is getting smaller so the hole gets bigger and the nail gets smaller and that's what causes the barns to fail because in the springtime, when the timbers are cold, and the nail is sticking in [the wood] like this they, well the nail is measuring the temperature inside the wood, where it's cold, and that makes the head cold, nailhead cold, and when you get a warm day in April and May, humid 00:54:00day, that nail head gets wet and that's what causes [old] barns to fail. I ran into the same problem in 1993 I think it was, the USS Constitution, was going to be 200 years old, I think in '96, so they wanted to [restore it]; it was starting to sag. With a wood ship it hogs and it we called about them.

LB: The hull?

AB: Well, below it...below that. Uh, I forget the name of it now anyway.

LB: The keel?

AB: Keel, yes. That gets some corrosion and it gets soft and it tends to go up, it's like a hogs back, that's why they call it hogging. And that was happening to the Constitution. And they want to have in perfect condition when its birthday came, along after 200 years. So they, I suggested that we look at the fasteners, and what was used there and see if that's causing the problem. And mostly it was the decay of the wood, softening of wood. Well I went out and looked at it and my wife went with me and we to look at the Constitution and 00:56:00they took us around. And I wanted to look some more so they, they let us walk through the whole ship. From top to bottom and that was while it was in the water. And then they went into dry dock and, what they do they have like a bathtub they drive it in there and put it on timbers and then pump the water out. And so it's up about head-high off the ground and sitting on timbers. And then they replace the pieces that they needed to take out. And I looked at that. The Constitution was built with copper pins, below the waterline. And the copper 00:57:00was from Paul Revere's copper company, go back that long. And the wood in the Constitution is live oak, and it's so heavy that lot of it doesn't float. And it's very strong, and it's not available in other countries and so in 1812 when the USS Constitution was going after the British fleet cannon balls that were hitting the Constitution would fall off, bounce off, and they called it "Old Ironsides," that's the name of it, that's still on it. So I did look at 00:58:00fasteners above the waterline and I couldn't find any corrosion really what was happening to the ship and my last week working with, out in Boston where we had a meeting of people from around the world on how to maintain wood ships, so it was quite a nice meeting.

LB: So what year was it then that you retired?

AB: '94. September '94.

LB: And I guess why did you decide to retire was it just?

AB: I was 39 years. Now things were changing here. The project I was in was not 00:59:00there anymore. I was still doing the same sort of thing but I knew it was going to change at the end of the year, calendar year. So I didn't want to stick around. And I had enough of it. I did other projects too, for the university. And that was to, had to do with wood burning. And we wanted to know how fast various species of wood, well density of wood, how fast it burns. And we put pieces of wood like this of various thickness I think, put them into the heating 01:00:00plant, on top of the coal and measured it. We knew what the temperature was in there, could measure it. And then we could take the piece out at various times and weigh it, and get the rate burning and, of a piece of wood. And the coal goes onto a belt and eventually burns at the other end. And it's not a belt really but its a metal but it gets pushed up and then down, it eventually goes to the other end and then it's ah cinders then. So students did that, mechanical engineering department, and there I was working with Ken Ragland. And he, he 01:01:00retired too a couple years after I did. I think I worked with him for over ten years with students. And that was one, burning, how fast a piece of wood would burn.

And then we, were looking at the industry, what the industry was trying to burn up their wood and a lot of it was not all wood. Some of is like particleboard, if you know what I mean, has adhesives in it, it's got things that well--in kitchen cupboards they have trouble with the adhesives smelling and people get, can't take it. That happened in New Orleans where they put in these trailers and 01:02:00people couldn't live in them but because of that, adhesive and other materials in there, they were not allowing people to burn particleboard at the mills where it's made, where they had trimmed off the board card, the particleboard to the right size so there's just a little bit on each edge that gets cut, thrown away. And, but we were measuring various wooden materials that contained other materials and looked at the smoke that comes out, and looking for various materials in there, but found out that the, the adhesive and things like that burn just as good as the wood and of course a lot of them are chemicals that 01:03:00burned if you burn them by themselves if, you'd be okay.

So we got around that problem and then we wanted to, we were burning a lot of wood say in California. Wood heating plants for electricity, quite large, they'd have huge piles of wood that are, and sometimes they'd bring in the orchard cuttings and that's a little bit different kind of wood then you'd find a regular tree, and there's a lot of minerals in the wood it's maybe about, on clean wood it's probably three to four percent ash and some of the bark is much 01:04:00higher than that maybe six, five or six percent. That'd be more like grass, five or six percent ash. Mostly silicon and ash--minerals are in there are volatile atvarious temperatures and potassium is one of them that goes at a very, quite a low press, temperature. And some of these plants where they have a big ring, platform, and it's aerated to keep the wood going around and finally burns out and the ash gets so hot that it becomes a liquid and it doesn't go out of the chimney and it ends up in the cooler places of the chimney. And some of those 01:05:00plants would have ash chunks as big as a Volkswagen. And that's kind of bad to work with. So we wanted to know about the, what metals are in wood that can cause this problem. And actually burn the wood and tried to catch the chemicals and at what temperatures they become bad. And then another study we did was to use particle, well woodchips and put them in to make a turbine, like a big, well we got a big helicopter engine, a turbine, where hot air blows through it and 01:06:00makes the thing go around. Well, we used wood in a pressurized system and we did make the turbine run. But the turbine blades would get stuck, this molten metals and that causes, caused the problems. We tried to get away from that but just couldn't do it. And that was sponsored by the Department of Energy. There were other people trying to do that too but Ken designed the system, Ken Ragland who--he had good students working it too.

LB: Well, I wanted to let you know that were a little over an hour at this point 01:07:00and I don't want to keep you any longer.

AB: Well I'm kind of trying to think, that was about the last thing I was going to mention...

LB: Yeah I was going to just sort of give you a last opportunity to record any particular memories.

AB: Well the laboratory did work on making charcoal in the '50s, when people started using charcoal on the grills, and farmers wanted to make charcoal, or people that had timber. And the Laboratory designed some system or kilns to put the wood in. To make charcoal you put the wood in and burn it but then don't 01:08:00give it enough air to burn up completely. So it gets hot enough to get rid of the volatiles and saves the carbon. So it goes from maybe nearly, well 90 percent carbon, the rest is ash, the ash doesn't burn off usually because it doesn't get that hot. So they even designed charcoal kilns that would be about this big, you'd put the logs in there and seal it up and start a fire. And of course what would happens is you'd get a lot of smoke coming out because the smoke doesn't get burned up it goes out as, the chemicals coming out they don't burn. Couldn't get away from that problem but it wasn't a real problem then because people weren't concerned about air pollution. And there was a lot of 01:09:00smoke coming out.

Well they still do it that way in Brazil, they make very small units half the size of this room and burn it and burn it with giving off lots of smoke. Well the Laboratory had quite a bit of interest in that and they had demonstrations from these groups around the country. And then the, the market for charcoal went to be quite big and they couldn't make it that way anymore. They had developed some, the industry developed some systems where they could burn it. Rotating, 01:10:00would start out at the top and work its way down, spiral it down, and end up with charcoal at the bottom. They were called a retort. Back in the '10s they made charcoal to make coke, well to make coke type charcoal that they would use for making cast iron and that was before they started making coke from coal. But when you make a big system like that where you make quite a bit of charcoal you collect the vapors coming off, condense them, and you end up with methanol, what 01:11:00else, maybe a couple hundred different chemicals. And some of that's good for making paint, paint thinner. And Henry Ford had plant in the Upper Peninsula, near Wisconsin, and he would make the [charcoal], collect those gases and then somebody make the black paint, for black, and you could only make, you could only buy a black car. So it's quite of interest in this country. When they started making metal here, like cast iron, when they first landed in where Virginia, I forget the name of the city, the first--

LB: Jamestown?

AB: Yeah. They had charcoal plants there to make charcoal, to make cast iron. And these were British people and England was making all kinds of cast iron, they made cast iron buildings.

LB: That's interesting. Well--

AB: I think that's about it.