@mansr @futurebird Plywood is 1850s, some of the crappier ones like chipboard are WW2 though.
There certainly were cheap products, poorly made products in existence as well and plenty of them. There's a second level of skew in the data there because bad ancient furniture is long lost.
Jul 3, 2026, 2:41 PM@etchedpixels @futurebird Plywood used properly can be very strong. Even chipboard/fibreboard can be a perfectly reasonable choice in some applications. Screwing into the edge of either is not proper, and that's how a lot of cheap things fail today if the plastic fasteners don't break first.
Of course there's a selection bias where we only know about what survived or was worth writing about. Where is the Ea-nāṣir of furniture?