Absolutely, some of the footage from 1954 made me cringe because of the nonchalant attitude to workplace safety. Only the women seemed willing to wear protective clothing. One of the men had this big white bandaid across his palm but just like the rest of the men he couldn’t be bothered to wear gloves. That’s the kind of idiotic macho workplace culture management should have stamped out.
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There were still problems with that into the 1960s.
As a student I worked for a company which was pretty enlightened for its day and I was asked one day to help out in a department which had both heat and glass in it. I asked the supervisor for gloves and goggles.
He said “Do you really want to bother with that stuff?”
Me: “Yes”
He: “Really?”
Me: “really yes”.
He: “Good, that means I can let you work in here without sending you off for safety training.”
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In the before time I had a job in a shipyard as a nuclear pipefitter. In the day one orientation room hung a photo of a drill press with some dudes hair and scalp wrapped around the bit.
Message received.
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I need to be signed in to see this photo, so please post it for public viewing.
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Hughes H-4 Hercules - the largest flying boat ever built, and the largest wingspan of any aircraft that has ever flown.
Plywood. Just saying.
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Beware: I know not of what I speak, but I do have a Lane coffee table, which is a knock-off of Danish mid-century modern circa 1950s… They’re all made from ply and with a nice veneer (even some Danish stuff), and are still very sought-after. The thinness of the american veneer makes it less desirable and mine has taken a beating, but they are still floating around and expensive. According to a wood-working friend of mine, even super high-end cabinetry often uses ply/composite with veneers these days, but it’s not mass produced stuff– they would make it in their small shop (edit: I mean the veneer, not the ply/composite board).
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I was actually surprised that they didn’t say “since the days of the Roman Empire”.
The big change since ancient times is large, accurate steel veneer knives. Instead of using hard-gained careful painstaking hand craftsmanship to split, adze and/or plane boards into uniformly thick panels that can be pressed into plywood, you put logs in a lathe and cut off huge sheets with a single spiralling cut. The amount of unavoidable waste the veneer knife eliminates is titanic! But really the process has not changed much, other than that one significant innovation.
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I remember seeing this film from some time ago, I really liked it, I think it’s worth watching and totally appropriate to link to here.
Yet one thing about it annoys me: the narrator says plywood is stronger than lumber of the same species and dimensions. This is a common misconception. You can look up the MOR for various types of lumber and engineered panels in the US Dept. of Ag’s Wood Handbook, and you can see plywood is usually less than half the strength of even lowly, inexpensive types of lumber, sometimes only about a third as strong.
This makes sense when you consider that any particular load on plywood is likely to stress only about half of the fibers within the panel, since half of the fibers always go the “wrong” way to contribute.
Working with plywood does mean you don’t have to think about grain direction, seasonal expansion, knotholes, potential warping, etc. That freedom turns out to be worth the trade-off in strength very often.
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You are right about most kinds of plywood, but for some high quality ones ultimate tensile strength is very high. There is plywood intended for machine parts that can have UTS of about 170 MPa (better than many aluminum alloys). It machines more like high density polyurethane tooling board than wood 
Here’s the link to one I’m talking about (UTS between 140-170 MPa):
http://www.sklejkapisz.pl/en/Products,692/COMPREG
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In one of the bathroom stalls of a research lab I worked at hung the story of how some poor man died after spilling a quart of phenol on his lap.
It was ideally placed because it was a couple minutes long read.
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The two factories in this video are also a bit different in that the old one is making what was probably standard construction plywood, while the new one is fancier birch hardwood plywood.
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I love this part of the V&A. Much more fun that all that stuff upstairs.
If you ever get north, the Castle Museum in York has similar exhibits.
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The American WW2 PT boats are sometimes described as plywood, but were actually made of diagonal layers of mahogany planking.
“[n] hours without a lost-time accident.” 
But the new factories don’t have any jobs as cool as log driver.
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Museum of Flight has a 747. And a DC-8 that was once an Air Force One. And an SR-71. And a Concorde. etc. etc.
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Seems awfully PG for ‘a mesmerizing adventure in composite laminates’ aided by sleazy electronica…
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Great film. No safety glasses or gloves required in Splinter City. Lots of “fluffing” going on when moving the sheets around, the sign of an experienced and practiced sheet goods handler.
You gotta “fluff the sheet” to get some air under it, lets you move the sheet on a cushion of air, like magic. Next time you load some drywall, take hold of one corner/end and “fluff the sheet” - after feeling it glide off onto your flat cart you’ll never do it any other way, I promise.
#protips
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My mother’s family was in the ship building business for several generations, and the last time I went to my uncle’s house he had pulled out a bunch of old shipyard photos from storage. They were of the building of some of these very ships, as well as of trips my grandfather and great-grandfather took to Mexico in the early '40s to buy mahogany logs.
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I believe the design originated with RNLI lifeboats. The problem with it is that because the layers were not glued together the life was short - but in wartime that was the least of people’s worries. The RNLI ones had the layers separated by canvas soaked in a mixture of linseed oil and lead oxide. Once water got into that there really wasn’t much that could be done.
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