Wednesday, October 03, 2018
Why was beadboard so popular?
In making my graphic tributes to lost places I use a lot of beadboard surfaces.
From 1880 to 1920, beadboard was nearly universal on inner walls of commercial buildings and schools, and often on the utility parts of residences. The 'nice' rooms had plaster walls, and the laundry or back porch had beadboard.
Beadboard would have been hard to clean and hard to paint. Wood is more resilient than plaster, so it could take bumping by furniture without chipping or cracking. But wider slats forming a flat surface would have served better. Tongue-and-groove wood flooring would have been easier to paint and clean, and would re-use existing materials and installation skills.
Possible advantages: Especially on ceilings, beadboard would diffuse light better than smooth wood. On walls and ceilings, beadboard would be acoustically interesting and perhaps superior to plaster or smooth wood. Beadboard would be an Acoustic Diffraction Grating, redistributing echoes by frequency.
Acoustic Diffraction Gratings are common but unfamiliar. Any building with a vertically ridged surface, concrete or metal, is an ADG. I first noticed the phenomenon on the KU computer center:
I was walking along the sidewalk in winter and my shoes were making scrunchy sounds in the snow. I heard a Doppler echo, almost like a ricocheting bullet, after each scrunch. Later I tried it with other transient sounds like claps and tongue-clicks, and it worked consistently. As the sound passes along the ridged concrete, each ridge preferentially echoes a longer and longer wavelength. It's just like an optical diffraction grating except that the spectrum spans time instead of distance.
From 1880 to 1920, beadboard was nearly universal on inner walls of commercial buildings and schools, and often on the utility parts of residences. The 'nice' rooms had plaster walls, and the laundry or back porch had beadboard.
Beadboard would have been hard to clean and hard to paint. Wood is more resilient than plaster, so it could take bumping by furniture without chipping or cracking. But wider slats forming a flat surface would have served better. Tongue-and-groove wood flooring would have been easier to paint and clean, and would re-use existing materials and installation skills.
Possible advantages: Especially on ceilings, beadboard would diffuse light better than smooth wood. On walls and ceilings, beadboard would be acoustically interesting and perhaps superior to plaster or smooth wood. Beadboard would be an Acoustic Diffraction Grating, redistributing echoes by frequency.
Acoustic Diffraction Gratings are common but unfamiliar. Any building with a vertically ridged surface, concrete or metal, is an ADG. I first noticed the phenomenon on the KU computer center:
I was walking along the sidewalk in winter and my shoes were making scrunchy sounds in the snow. I heard a Doppler echo, almost like a ricocheting bullet, after each scrunch. Later I tried it with other transient sounds like claps and tongue-clicks, and it worked consistently. As the sound passes along the ridged concrete, each ridge preferentially echoes a longer and longer wavelength. It's just like an optical diffraction grating except that the spectrum spans time instead of distance.
Labels: Asked and badly answered, Leth
¶ 2:18 AM
