Who invented chainsaw

The man most commonly credited with inventing the modern chainsaw is someone with a name that will still be familiar to anybody who uses these tools today — Andreas Stihl. Although the company that Stihl founded has gone on to become famous for producing the big and powerful professional-grade gas chainsaws that are now the mainstay of the logging industry, his first invention was actually an electric chainsaw that was patented in Three years later in , he followed this up with a gas-powered version — but Emil Lerp, founder of rival chainsaw company Dolmar, beat him to it, having already produced his own gas-powered model in These machines are often claimed to be the first modern chainsaws, but they were still a long way from our modern conception of a chainsaw.

These saws were large and bulky and required two men to operate them. The first one-man chainsaws did not begin to appear until two decades later, after the Second World War. With the outbreak of hostilities, Germany and the United States found themselves on opposing sides, which meant German-made chainsaws were no longer readily available in North America. One result of this was that it stimulated chainsaw innovation in the US, and with advances in materials and manufacturing techniques, two-man chainsaws were gradually replaced by lighter machines that could be wielded by a single operator.

One final important chapter in the development of the modern chainsaw came in the late s when Joseph Buford Cox, an experienced logger and inventor came up with a significant improvement to the chains that were in use at the time. As the story goes, one day in when he was out logging, he paused to reflect on how the larvae of the timber beetle were able to chew through hard wood so easily where metal chains would struggle.

To cut a long story short, he developed a new type of chainsaw chain that mimicked the teeth of the grubs. Today, we have the modern chainsaw that any homeowner can purchase and use to perform woodcutting tasks. It was a handheld device that included a long blade that guided a chain with sharp teeth around it through the turning of a handle connected to a sprocket wheel.

The osteotome made it much easier to cut through bone as compared to a hammer and chisel where splintering could occur. In , the Hamilton Saw was invented, which was a hand-cranked chainsaw used by two men that looked like a giant spinning wheel. In the s, the American Riding Saw made its debut and was another human-powered chainsaw. This type, however, looked like a rowing machine that a single person sat on and would operate it. Some reports claim that around the turn of the twentieth century, an inventor and naturalist named John Muir was the first person to transfer the idea of the osteotome to a larger mechanical machine that was used for logging purposes.

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PPCM may not be as rare as we think—but it doesn't have to be a death sentence. And other weird things we learned this week. Period tech helped women "overcome prejudice leveled against a bleeding body. Sign up to receive Popular Science's emails and get the highlights. Chainsaws had a grisly role in labor and delivery. Public Domain.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on January 15,