Canadian Woodworks

Living in the beautiful country side of Erin, Ontario 45 minutes west of Toronto.  I start each day with my morning coffee and enjoy my short walk to the workshop.  I spend early mornings and late nights designing and building custom one of a kind furniture, I love every minute of it. Canadian Woodworks uses salvaged lumber which would otherwise end up chipped or in a landfill.  We custom mill and dry the wood ensuring our quality controls.  We strive to provide hardwood products through simply reusing what would otherwise be considered “waste”.

The Lichtenberg Figure appears on many of the wood boards made by the Canadian Woodworks.  These figures are created using a very high voltage while the boards are wet to burn the pattern into the wood.

Lichtenberg figures are named after the German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who originally discovered and studied them. When they were first discovered, it was thought that their characteristic shapes might help to reveal the nature of positive and negative electric "fluids". In 1777, Lichtenberg built a large electrophorus to generate high voltage static electricity through induction. After discharging a high voltage point to the surface of an insulator, he recorded the resulting radial patterns by sprinkling various powdered materials onto the surface. By then pressing blank sheets of paper onto these patterns, Lichtenberg was able to transfer and record these images, thereby discovering the basic principle of modern xerography.

This discovery was also the forerunner of the modern day science of plasma physics. Although Lichtenberg only studied two-dimensional (2D) figures, modern high voltage researchers study 2D and 3D figures (electrical trees) on, and within, insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are now known to be examples of fractals.