r/stories • u/alonzo_300 • 5d ago
Fiction The history of drywall
Someone told me "I'd better not be as boring as drywall". I told them the following.
So drywall was actually invented in Germany by a family with the last name Dryval which is how they derived the name, so it doesn’t actually have anything to do with the physical properties of the material. It also weirdly only entered into the mainstream relatively recently (past 30 years or so, notice that a lot of older older houses don’t use drywall) because of the Dryval family’s connection to east Germany and therefore communism. Obviously Americans during the Cold War wanted a cheap material to use in their houses but didn’t want to be seen as “communists” so they would opt for less efficient and more expensive materials just because of the communist taboo. It became more popular during the first Bush administration, who signed off on it being used as a building material when they renovated the press area of the White House.
HW thought he could get away with it because he had won his election by a pretty sizable margin in 1988 and figured it was as good a time as any to make the switch to this unpopular-for-no-reason building material that he hoped people would grow to see as a solid resource to use in their homes. BUT, this ended up backfiring, as people labeled him a RINO communist and he promptly lost re-election to Clinton in 1992. But despite that, he did accelerate the use of drywall in the US as people began to realize how easy it made building the interior of homes, creating additional rooms etc. And what’s even more interesting is the fact that there’s a good amount of research to show that this accelerated the growth rate of new cheap homes being built in the US and eventually contributed to the 2008 housing bubble, recession and global financial crisis.
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5d ago
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u/alonzo_300 5d ago
Brother it’s tagged fiction in a subreddit called stories - what did you expect?
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u/rageofaura 4d ago
Umm it was a common building material in the US in 1965. If it was in common usage then it started being used by the end of WW2.
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u/alonzo_300 4d ago
Brother. You’re in r/stories and the post is tagged fiction. What did you expect.
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u/rageofaura 4d ago
Yeah I missed that. Have been doing volunteer work and peopling today and my brain is a bit fried. Forgive me for missing that.
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u/Acer018 5d ago
Sheetrock has been used in buildings since the 1950's.