From Forest Conservation to Market Preservation: Invention and Diffusion of Wood-Preserving Technology, 1880-1939

That the drain on the forests of the country would be materially reduced by a proper preservative treatment of all structural timbers can not be doubted. —National Conservation Commission, 1909 In many instances the present question is whether to use treated wood or dispense with wood altogether. —National Committee on Wood Utilization, 1930 Few technological artifacts are as prosaic as the railroad tie. Tie technology evolved in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a sophisticated technological system central to track structure. It includes rails, spikes, tie plates, and ballast, which provides the stability and flexibility necessary to carry heavy loads at high speeds as economically as possible. During the 1880s railroad demand for timber bridges, buildings, rolling stock, and especially ties accounted for perhaps 20 percent of total demand for wood in the United States. By 1900, surging wood consumption in all sectors generated a nascent forest-conservation movement. Conservationists advocated wood-preservation technologies as a key component of their drive to reduce demands on American forests. They began with the railroad tie. The railroads approached tie preservation with a complicated blend of economic and technological considerations. The great advantage of the End Page 311 wooden tie was, and is, its low initial cost—a cost offset in part by the need to replace them frequently. Wooden ties were always rotting and could be destroyed by rail cutting or split by spiking. Replacement added labor costs and disrupted traffic. On the other hand, applying a wood preservative increased both a tie's cost and its life expectancy. Wood preservation's value as an investment depended on interest costs and on how much longer the tie might last, which in turn reflected the state of preservation technology. Thus the story of wood preservation brings together these ubiquitous wooden slabs with business decisions and the uncertain and evolving science and technology of wood preservation. This essay advances two principal arguments: first, that the desire to reduce the uncertainties associated with preservation resulted in the innovation of new institutions to manage the technology—a development in which the railroads played a central role; and second, that wood preservation demonstrates some of the conservation movement's inherent ambiguities. In the traditional story, the cheapness of wood in America discouraged its preservation throughout most of the nineteenth century, but as prices rose after 1880 the railroads experimented with tie preservation. From these tiny origins the proportion of ties preserved gradually rose to nearly 90 percent by the eve of World War II.1 This scenario glosses over important aspects of the story. Wood-preservation technology presented information and contracting problems that had to be resolved before it could be reliably employed. Similar problems had arisen in the development of steel rails and automatic couplers and air brakes for freight cars. The carriers developed organizations such as the Master Car Builders to negotiate standards governing materials, production methods, and other technological considerations in response to these problems. Several researchers have demonstrated the complexities of this process for steel rails: initially, neither the chemistry of steel nor rail wear were well understood. Working through the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and other organizations, engineers representing both the carriers and the steel companies negotiated and modified rail specifications as scientific understanding evolved.2 End Page 312 Similarly, initial studies by the ASCE found that while preservation was widely employed in Europe by the 1880s, in the United States similar processes yielded unsatisfactory results. Here, international technology transfer appeared to be unexpectedly troublesome even for such apparently simple operations. After 1900, as tie prices rose, the railroads applied their expertise in institution-building and standardization to the problem of wood preservation. Along with commercial suppliers, they established the American Wood Preservers' Association (AWPA) to improve and standardize the new technology, while the American Railway Engineering Association (AREA) established committees to study ties and wood...