WALLS AND CEILINGS
THE HISTORY OF DRYWALL

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Drywall is a construction product commonly
used to finish the interior walls and ceilings of buildings.

For hundreds of years prior to the development of drywall, the interior walls of all buildings were usually made of plaster. This was a painstaking process that first required nailing thousand of feet of wooden strips known as lath or boards known as lath boards to the framing of every room. The wood was covered with a coarse layer of plaster called the “scratch coat.” The wet “scratch coat” plaster squeezed through the gaps in the lath, locking it in place. Days later, when the scratch coat was dry, a second “brown coat” was applied to make the surfaces roughly flat. This, too, had to dry for several days. Last came the “skim coat”, a thin layer of pure white plaster that produced a smooth finished surface.

Depending on the weather, this process could take days or even weeks, during which time no other trade could work inside the house. This was how plasterwork had been done for centuries, and there seemed no reason to change.

Then came World War II, the government had an urgent need for military structures ranging from barracks to whole bases. Faced with shortages of both labor and material, Uncle Sam was desperate to find faster and cheaper ways to build. And since beauty was not much of an issue, eliminating plaster was an obvious starting point.

Enter the United States Gypsum Company, which had invented drywall way back in 1916. during its early history, drywall was not readily accepted. Between 1916 and World War II sheetrock still hadn’t really caught on. Even its successful use in most of the buildings at the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1933-34 didn’t do much for sales and the product was generally seen as an inferior alternative to plaster.

The US Gypsum Company called these panels sheetrock. Sheetrock is made of a paper liner wrapped around an inner core made primarily from gypsum plaster. The plaster is mixed with fiber, foaming agent, various additives that increase mildew and fire resistance and water. It is than formed by sandwiching a core of this wet material (gypsum) between two sheets of heavy paper or fiberglass mats. When these mats dry they become strong enough for use as an interior finish material on walls and ceilings.

As Uncle Sam soon came to appreciate, Sheetrock did away with the need for lath, multiple plaster coats, and days and days of drying time (hence its generic name, “drywall.”)

Compaired to the old method of plastering, installation of sheetrock on walls and ceilings was extremely simple: After the 4x8 sheets were nailed up, the nail holes were filled, paper tape was used to cover the joints, and a textured coating was troweled on to the wall and ceiling to help disguise the defects.

All this was only meant as a stopgap replacement for plaster, and it was expected to be “business as usual” after the war was over, when both labor and materials were again abundant. But things didn’t turn out that way. By the war’s end, many builders, who’d gotten used to slapping up drywall, were suddenly reluctant to go back to the trouble and expense of plastering. What’s more, sheetrock’s arrival coincided with the rise of modern architecture, which preferred plain, flat surfaces to the fussy moldings and reveals of prewar styles. To Modernist tastes, the fact that sheetrock couldn’t be molded the way wet plaster could was hardly a drawback. People seemed more dismayed by the "cardboardish" sound of the walls in their postware homes than by anything else, but they soon got used to it.

If necessity is the mother of invention, than profit is its fuel. There's no doubt that sheetrock proved a huge boon to the postwar housing industry. Prior to the war, the typical American developer built about four houses a year. By the late 1940s, a developer was able to churn out thousands of tract homes, sell them for around $8,000.00. and still make a thousand dollars profit on each one. Mass production was the key to the postwar housing boom, and sheetrock helped make it happen.

WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS BIT OF CONSTRUCTION HISTORY. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT US WITH YOUR COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS.

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