The Timber Load
A measure of wood defined by what a cart could pull.
Origin
Customary in the English timber trade from the medieval period, and standardised through the shipbuilding and construction industries.
The catch
The load is 50 cubic feet of squared timber but only 40 of round. The difference is not arbitrary: a load was originally what a horse and cart could manage, and round logs waste space between them, so fewer cubic feet of actual wood fill the same cart.
| Form | Cubic feet | Cubic metres | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round timber (unhewn) | 40 | 1.13 | Logs as felled, wasteful of space |
| Squared timber (hewn) | 50 | 1.42 | Baulks, stacking efficiently |
| One-inch planks | 600 sq ft | — | Sold by surface area at a fixed thickness |
| Standard (Petrograd) | 165 cu ft | 4.67 | The Baltic import measure |
| Cord (firewood) | 128 cu ft | 3.62 | Stacked 4 × 4 × 8 feet |
The Petrograd standard reflects where British timber actually came from: the Baltic trade supplied deals and battens to British ports in enormous quantity, and the importing measure was set at the Russian end. The cord survives as the standard measure for firewood in North America but was never much used in Britain, where the load and the stack held sway. The word cord itself refers to the string once used to bind the stack.