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Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
THE
VOL. LXXI. No. 11
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., at 373 4th Ave., New York. Sept. 11, 1920
Single Copies 10 Cents
12.00 Fer Year
Practical Conservation
T
H E piano trade is waking" up. This is not a pleasantry, nor does it mean that one wishes to please the
vanity of readers. It is the statement of a simple fact. Let us repeat it: The piano trade is waking up.
And to what? To the fact, long known to a few but hitherto always neglected, that manufacturing,
as well as merchandising, is a science, which can be carried on successfully only in the light of that
truth. It has taken our industry long.enough, indeed, to find this out. Even now the realization is neither
very profound nor very widespread. We should doubtless be glad, though, that it has arisen at all.
Among the features of the practical realization that manufacturing must be based on scientific prin-
ciples is the truth that the whole question of raw materials, their conservation and supply, must be regarded as
equally essential with the problems which come up in the course of the transformation of those materials into
the finished product.
In a word, we have waked up to the great fact that the piano trade is deeply, essentially interested in
the conservation of raw materials. Conservation during the past two years has ceased to be an academic ques-
tion with us. We have had too many and painful evidences that natural resources, timber especially, are in
danger of exhaustion, and already we see signs that an extremely uncomfortable state of affairs is rapidly
developing.
.
Meanwhile the Government has not been idle. During the last few days there were being held in
Madison, Wis., at the Forest Products Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture, ceremonies in celebration
of the tenth anniversary of the laboratory's work. The object of this laboratory is to discover ways and means
for linking up the policy of timber conservation with the needs of industry. The problem is twofold. The
timber resources of the nation are being rapidly exhausted. On the other hand, the consumption of manufac-
tured lumber is steadily increasing. How can the two divergent facts be brought together?
The laboratory is at work specifically on this problem. It is finding out many interesting facts. Three-
fourths of the felled timber in the great timber tracts, we learn, is at present wasted, seeing that it cannot be
profitably brought out of the forests to the mills on account of the small demand for it. In other words,
we find that the demand for lumber is curiously spotty and almost entirely unsystematized. The lumbermen
say they must furnish what is demanded. Hence they cut unsystematically, and fell enormous quantities of
timber which go entirely to waste.
The laboratory has for several years been conducting experiments on behalf of piano and phonograph
manufacturers, as well as other users of high-grade lumber, to discover means for so treating the grades now
wasted, or regarded as useless for fine work, as to enable manufacturers to utilize them. Methods of heat-
treatment, improvements in dry-kiln practice and a thousand other points are being patiently worked out for
the benefit of our industry, and without cost.
The laboratory does this for all who will apply to it, although, of course, the Government is not in a
position to compel anyone to take its advice. That is perhaps as well in some cases, though it is by no means
as well in this case, one feels.
Is it too much to urge that the industry should not merely wake up to some of the big questions which
are to-day before it, but should remain thoroughly awake to them? Is it too much to urge manufacturers of
pianos and talking machines to look into the work of the Forest Products Laboratory, for the purpose of
finding out what they can do to utilize lumber now going to waste? Surely not!
One of the largest lumber manufacturers in the country is to-day spending much money in a survey
of wood-using industries, in the attempt to put its production on a more systematic basis and thus contribute
towards the elimination of the present appalling waste. The president of the National Piano Manufacturers'
Association is giving his time and interest to this work. The help is waiting, it needs only to be utilized.