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History of the Forest Products Laboratory

Interview #912: Setterholm, Vance C. (June, 2009)

View all of First Interview Session (February 18, 2008)

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00:15:43 - 00:20:43 Travel

travel, money, materiel containers; Carlson, Tad; plywood and structures design, pulp and paper, papermaking, paper products, Institute of Paper Chemistry, project leader, Washington D.C.

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00:15:43

BW

Well, yeah, how about this - did your job or the projects that you worked on - did it take you away from the office? Did you get to do any traveling, and if so, where did you go? Do you have any stories or memories about that?

VS

Yeah, actually the whole world was ours in terms of where. We had limitations on expenses. Money was always a problem. For example, we, in the early days, took the trains, later days flew, but there was no limit to who we might work with.

BW

Okay. What-

VS

This is not getting at, this is not the direction I want to go -

BW

No, this is fine, I was going to ask you, what divisions or which compartments did you work for at Forest Products Labs?

VS

Which departments did I work for?

BW

Yes sir.

VS

Okay. Well let's try, I'll try and review that quickly with you. In 1951 to '54, I worked for Material Containers for a man by the name of Tad Carlson, he was the division chief. From '54 to '56, I worked in Plywood and [Structural] design of sandwich. From '56 to '58, I was working in pulping research. And from '59 to '63, I started working on paper making and this is at the point in my career where I saw the future sort of open up for me in awareness that the paper industry didn't know how to measure paper properties. They didn't know what to measure or why they were measuring, as far as I was concerned. And instruments they were using were all wrong. Not all wrong, but substantially not the ones that were needed to really evaluate. The explanation of that last statement is this: if you want to improve a property you have to be able to measure it, and they were not measuring the properties that were important to the performance or enabled you to design the product. This, of course, is an enormous, enormous area that just opens up here. And by then, skipping way ahead here, '58 to '63, to papermaking, and I initiated a research work unit on fundamental properties of paper. And in '63 to '68, we worked in that area developing techniques and tools and a greater understanding of paper as an engineering material. In 1968 to 1972, I was supervisor of a number of employees working in this same field and by that time we were getting an international reputation and we had the Swedes send people over to study, the Chinese sent people over to study. We had visits from the Institute of Paper Chemistry. The British, we had close contacts with. In other words, our horizons were expanding. From '72 to '86, more of the same. I was a project leader. And then about by 1986 we had a lot behind us in the way of accomplishment and I was invited to go to Washington D.C. and I was at that time also serving in the director's office as the director of pulp and paper research in general. Then that kind of gets you through up to forty years of service. But what other questions might you have?

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