In 1935, while pushing his concept of the $700 airplane, Vidal had seen the Atwood Duply Airmobile (civil registration number NC-15318), an experimental aircraft invented by Harry Atwood and test flown by Clarence Chamberlin. It was constructed with a seamless one-piece fuselage using "Duply," a steam-cooked laminate made from birch veneer strips impregnated with cellulose acetate."Duply" was a portmanteau derived from "DuPont," whose labs were the site of the first experimentation, and "plywood." Atwood still owned Atwood Carolina, a pre-war airplane manufacturing company. His biographer states that he and Vidal were vying to be known as the "Henry Ford of aviation" and Atwood felt he was "cheated" out of his patent by Vidal, whom he says purchased it for $10,000 in 1939 and then only paid a year's royalty before filing for a patent under his own name with slight changes in the process. Atwood's process and Vidal's superficially resembled each other but employed different bonding methods. (Mansfield, pp, 132, 165, and 185-186) After leaving the BAC, Vidal experimented from 1937 to 1940 with wood-resin composites using a thermosetting polymer process similar to Duramold under the banner of the Vidal Research Corporation. The experiments with the durable waterproof plywood material, said to have a greater tensile strength than a comparable thickness of aluminum, evolved initially into a small business producing only trays and dinghies. Vidal patented the process as "Vidal Weldwood",Kaplan (1999), P. 113 variously described as "cooked wood" or "molded plywood."
