Spalting wood history Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 5000 words

Spalting wood history - Essay Example Although there was a reduction in use of splated wood in art and craft between the mid-16th and early 20th centuries, scientists have been continually using spalting in wood. In the early 1900s, there was an increased interest with spalting for people who knew it as a craft material, a biological artifact or those that saw it as a nuisance that needed control. The anamorph of Chlorciboria as Dothiorina tulasnei were classified by Hohnel (1915), Robert Hartig in a 1900 publication Lehrbuch der Pfanzenkrankheiten, wrote the fungal cause of blue stained lumber and suggested the fungus Ceratostoma piliferum which is currently known as Ceratocystis pilifera, widely known as blue stain fungus as culprit. Fredrick Tom Brooks filed a patent in 1913 called Improvements in or Relating to Colouring and/or Preserving Wood because of the possibilities of pigmented spalted wood (Brooks 1913). Brooks was comfortable enough with the green stain pigment production of the Chlorociboria genus to induce it artificially in wood, which he retrieved from the work of Vuillemin, despite that during this time, the work of fungi on wood was on the onset of development. Brooks used single spore isolations to inoculate sterilized wood, incubated it under wet and sterile conditions and dried the wood before decay could take place. His identification of the specific genus that creates the unique blue-gree wood of historic intarsias was perfect. The specific species that he would like to work with Chlorosplenium aeruginosum and Peziza aeruginosa are detailed in his patent as fungi that can produce green stain in wood, and are limited to the colonization of other wood decay fungi. Today, spalting is inducedby similar processes to Brook’s inoculation method. Brooks’ patent came up during when pigmented wood found on a merchantable timber was being investigated heavily to find out cause. In 1903, the United States Department