The Chainsaw Was a Bone Saw in 1785 — Then Stihl Sold It to Loggers

In 1785 the chainsaw existed only as a surgical instrument: John Aitken drew a toothed link chain between two wooden handles in an Edinburgh midwifery textbook, built to cut bone. In 1830 Bernhard Heine put that chain on a sprocket and ran it round a guide plate in Würzburg. Chain, sprocket, bar. The layout of every saw sold today. This entry follows that layout out of the operating theatre and into the forest, and counts what it cost on the way. From the 1880s the standard felling tool in North America was the double-bit axe and the two-man crosscut saw, the misery whip, and it stayed the standard for roughly sixty years. Samuel J. Bens filed an endless-chain saw for felling redwoods in 1903, granted as United States patent 780,476 in 1905, and it worked in every respect except that nobody could lift it. Andreas Stihl founded his business in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt in 1926 and his first machine weighed 48 kilos, drew 2.2 kilowatts, needed two men and a power line, and could not fell a tree. Emil Lerp's Dolmar Typ A of 1927 went anywhere and weighed 57 to 58 kilos. What moved the weight was an order rather than an idea. From 1939 the German army bought chain saws at scale, and in 1943 Stihl was required to build one standardized model, the KS 43: 8 horsepower out of roughly 36 kilos, with blower housing, fuel tank and carburettor housing in die-cast magnesium. The war did not invent the chain saw. It paid for the casting shop. In Oregon in 1946 Joseph Buford Cox watched a timber beetle larva cut across the grain and drew a cutter with the same geometry; the first chipper chain sold in November 1947. Then a number settled it. McCulloch's 3-25 came out of California in October 1949 at 25 pounds, 11.3 kilos, 3 horsepower, 77 cubic centimetres. The second man was no longer required. The ledger also records what that saw did to hands, and who was never paid for it. Chapters: 0:00 The bone saw of 1785 0:48 The misery whip and a 48-kilo Stihl 4:55 The KS 43 and the chipper chain 10:42 25 pounds: the McCulloch 3-25 17:01 The balance: Stihl, McCulloch, Husqvarna 21:11 Ledger line: 48 to 4.5 kilos Sources: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00420-006-00... https://doi.org/10.1177/0036933004049... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15209... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16523... https://www.cpsc.gov/content/chain-sa... https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Re... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1... https://history.stihl.com/1940-1949.aspx https://history.stihl.com/1970-1979.aspx https://npshistory.com/publications/u... https://patents.google.com/patent/US7... https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/... https://science.howstuffworks.com/sci... https://allthatsinteresting.com/symph... https://www.mohma.org/instruments/cat... #chainsaw #Stihl #McCulloch #logging #industrialhistory