When was the chainsaw made

Symphysiotomies are no longer performed in modern surgery, with the process of childbirth now far safer and more advanced than it used to be. A German orthopaedist called Bernhard Heine designed another version of the chainsaw in , also to be used in surgery. He called it an osteotome, from the Greek osteo bone and tomi cut — literally the bonecutter.

At the start of the 20th century, people began to realise chainsaws could be useful outside of medicine. His plan was to use to to fell giant redwoods.

In , the first electric chainsaw that was actually produced and sold was patented by Andreas Stihl. Many of the early models were so large they had to be operated by two men. Chainsaws improved dramatically after the Second World War, thanks to improvements in aluminium and engine design that made them lighter.

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.

Bens on January 17, The first portable chainsaw was patented in by Canadian James Shand. What a horrifying thought. In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, some rather outlandish contraptions began to appear in an attempt to mechanize the felling of large trees, something that had been done manually up until that point.

This could more accurately be described as a chainsaw, but the machine was bulky and impractical and was never used extensively in the field. 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.