The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1918-06-14
PRODUCTION OF ARPLANE SPRUCE
 MUST CONTINUE


 Washington, June 14.-John D. Ryan, financier and copper magnate, has been saying nothing ever stnce-ho took over direction of aircraft pro- duction, but considerable evidence has accumulated that points towards definite accomplishment in one direc- ton that military men say it would be most dangerous to neglect.
 That is the production of airplane spruce.
 War figures are all large, too large for most people to digest, but lumber men say that MT. Ryan has demand ed 15,00O, 900 feet a month from the Cascade forests, and little things like the drafting of 5000 men, the plan ming of logging railroads and the mo- bilization of a rather large existing industry for war production, indicate that he intends to get it.
 The consoling fact is that if Amer ican factories are late in making planes, so long as the raw material How to France and England is main tained, the Allies will have machines.
 MT. Ryan's first move was to call in Colonel Disque, head of the spruce division, from Portland Ore, and thereafter something was started. There had always been less criticism of the spruce production efforts than of anything else that had been done, largely because the expected con sumption of the rsw material did not develop. About 3,O0O,OO0 feet of spruce was the by-product of normal fir and other lumber cutting in the northwest each month. The allies were getting all of that from the open markets, and it was a. simple matter for the American Government to step in and take it all. It was also com paratively~ simple to increase prices a trifle, and double the normal produc- tion.
 But when it comes to running the output up to the mark MT. Ryan is credited with setting, a task is pro jected that Is immense when com pared to even the inflated standards of war work. It is because of the peculiar qualities of Sitka. spruce that it sustains the stresses of high speed airplancs better than any other sub stance the world knows, and it is be- cause of it's peculiar distribution and habitat that the United States is find ing it difficult task to get enough of it. It had but low esteem as a com merclal wood in the pre-war days, most of it getting into the waste piles of saw mill yards, though a. little of the bsst and thickest, specially pre- pared went into the sounding boards lof piaDos. Queeriy enough, Germany a ivuu fer nF ton of the product
 Now thai the world needs spruce, a lot of Americans will have to buy Lib erty bonds and keep on doing it in- definitely just because the Sitka spruce has retiring disposition and is finicky about the places where it grows. It grows only when sur rounded by trees of a. different spe- cies, which habit the lumberman is describing when he says that from E to 40 per cent. of given timber stand Is the best that spruce shows Ii likes the sea-fog from the Pacific ocean, and grows to valuable size on- ly in scattered belts where the fog comes regularly.
 Lastly, only about 35 or 40 per cent of the wood in the trunk has the Sei OiAS Lls bOuSIlueSS, anu TeSll1dnCJ that airplane struts and spars require It takes special machinery and spe. cial handling in hundreds of mills small and large, to get out this SE per cent
 It isn't practical or possible, the lumber operators find, to take out the spruce unless surrounding trees arc also removed. All the logs are i'm. mense in size, and it takes railroads motor trucks, or donkey engine cable, to move them. Working out the prob lem means that to get the Is, 900 OOC feet of airplane spruce will reuuir, the handling of at least 100 900 o0t feet of other timber monthly. I will involve also problems concern ing the disposition, present and flu ture, of the unused fir and other tim Der that comes out with the spruce.
 But immense as the task is, ther are signs that it is being done. MT Ryan continues his refusal to tall about the method. And it only take 200 board feet of spruce to make on airplane.