Chain Saw (Courtesy-www.fotosearch.com)
Lumberjacks, loggers, and husbands who have to prune the trees in the backyard must be thanking the ingenious inventor who thought of the chain saw. Environmentalists and nature lovers, on the other hand, must be condemning the stupid and short-sighted inventor who thought of the chain saw. On whichever side of the fence you are, it would pay to know who actually invented this device. At least you will know who to thank or blame.
The German orthopaedist Bernard Heine is generally credited to be the inventor of the first chain saw at around 1830, although he did not quite conceive of it as the tree-cutting machine it has become. He called his invention the osteotome and he meant to use it to cut bones. His chain saw had a chain that carried small cutting teeth. The chain glided around an extended guiding blade with the cranking of a handle attached to a sprocket engaging the chain. The teeth were angled to give them more cutting power.
A Californian inventor named Muir is said to be the first person to apply the principles of the chain saw to logging. However, his success with his invention was limited because it was too heavy that it required a crane to operate it.
In 1861, a certain Hamilton is said to have seen a hand-cranked simple logging machine that was operated by one or two men, and which looked like a spinning wheel. In the 1880s, there was also the American riding saw. It looked like a rowing machine and the operators could sit on it.
Three persons can be credited for the development of the modern chain saw. In 1926, another German developed and patented the “Cutoff Chain Saw for Electric Power”. His name is Andreas Stihl, a name known by almost half of those who use chain saws in the United States. In 1929, he developed a gasoline-powered version and mass-produced them at a company he founded.
Stihl, however, was not the first to develop a gasoline-fed chain saw. This distinction belongs to Emil Lerp who tested his invention in Mount Dolmar in the Thuringer Forests of Germany in 1927. He later founded a company, Dolmar GmbH, to mass-produce his invention. In 1991, the company was bought by Makita of Japan.
Joseph Buford Cox is another contributor to the modern chain saw. He invented the chipper type chain for chain saws. Observing a timber beetle chew on trees, he concluded that a chain saw cutting teeth with the same configuration as the jaws of the beetle would be more efficient than the existing chains. He, too, founded a company to mass-produce his invention. It exists today as the Oregon Cutting Systems Division of Blount, Inc.
