Archimedes Plutonium schreef
Question: were the planes in WW1 made of wood?

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Yes, partly. Mostly the wing construction, sometimes the fuselage
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I love the superiority list of woods. Some say that hickory has the
highest tensile strength and some say ash, as per baseball bats. I
seem to think that ash beats hickory but am not set up to prove it.

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If you think that, you never saw a list of woods (MOE)
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I suppose if Oak were lighther than Spruce that the Wright Brothers
would have prefered oak.

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They would have lived in an alternate universe with different physical laws,
so who knows?
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I know that spruce has a dense foliage

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Ever look at a spruce?
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and so
its root and wood system must be special in order to stand upright in
those Colorado wind gales. So the Spruce wood must be strong to
withstand the wind

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To some extent this goes for just about any wood. However mostly the trick
is not to withstand the winds. Trees that really stand up to the wind have
wood that is worthless as regards to strength properties.
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but must be light because it is a soft wood.

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The other way about. An exception reputedly being kadsura
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I believe the science of botany should appoint a team of experts on
wood with the collobaration of physicists and engineers to make a
encyclopedic analysis of all the world's woods as to their
superlatives and characteristics. Their density, their strengths and
many other characteristics.

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They might also look in existing encyclopedias
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So much of wood knowledge is folklore and myths and not really the full
truths.

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This is self contradictionary.
But indeed people believe the weirdest thing about woods
PvR