From the Vault: Invention of the Chainsaw, Part 2

Published Oct 29, 2022, 10:01 AM

In this classic invention-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss an important piece of cutting technology. Plus, during the Halloween season, masked brutes will chase you around your local haunted attraction with one of these if you buy a ticket. Yes, it’s time to discuss the chainsaw. (originally published 10/28/2021)

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to hop on into the Vault for an older episode of the show. Uh. This week it's gonna be Invention of the Chainsaw, Part two, following up on last Saturday's Vault. This one originally aired October. I think this is the one where we get into some bio mimetic chainsaw design. You couldn't say words that would be more heartworming to me than those. All Right, the saw is back. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on the invention of the chainsaw. And the last time I think we left off after we've been talking about the reasoning behind chains as a as a cutting surface rather than just a a solid blade or even as opposed to a giant circular saws. But this time we wanted to come back and talk a little bit more about the early history of power saws leading up to the modern chainsaw, as well as some rather rather distressing medical digressions. Well, before we get into the medical stuff, I want to come back to something I mentioned in passing. In the last episode, I mentioned how I had I was vaguely familiar with stuff like the misery whip and other, uh, you know, lumberjacking techniques and technologies based on a cartoon that I saw when I was a kid, or and probably saw more than once, you know, probably had on a VHS tape or something. Um. I described it, and our producer Seth, who is well versed in the cartoon universe, he told me, oh, well that I think the one you're talking about is nineteen Up a Tree. This is a Disney short featuring Donald Duck as well as Chippendale. And this is absolutely it. This is the one with scenes of you know, Donald is chasing the chip monks around trying to cut down trees. They're all sorts of weird mishaps with saws. Do you remember this one at all, Joe? Certainly, not in any detail, not in any more than the sort of images you described last time. Well, I'm going to cut right to the end and see if this rings a bell. This is the last two sentences from the Wikipedia summary for upper Tree. From quote, all Donald can do is watch with day's grief as his home is rocketed into the air and explodes three times. Chippendale pretend to comfort Donald, then proceed to roll in the ground and laugh hysterically. Chippendale the sociopaths. They are bad friends. Granted, you know, Donald did a lot of bad things before that, so he was very much getting his come uppance. But you've taken out of contact. That sounds that sounds pretty rough. No one should have to watch their home explode three times and then be brutally mocked by chipmunks. Yeah. Now, wait, is this before Chip and Dale wherever rescue rangers? I thought they would need to be rescuing people whose house that was decades later. That was like a nineties thing, right, Okay, this was this was back in the fifties when it was just all about you know there in a way, there was kind of a a very shallow environmental message here, uh that Donald is bad for going after their habitat and distressing their home, and Chip and Dale are good for wanting to maintain the pristine nature of their natural environment. The term is tree poaching. Donald was tree poaching also, he was I think he was being rather unsafe with some of the saws. I made that up by the way, there, I've never heard of tree poaching. Well, I mean it is you could certainly get into trouble for cutting, for felling trees on someone else's land. That would be a type of poaching, right, especially if they're full of sentien chipmunks. Uh, okay, okay. So the next thing that I think we have to talk about in the history of the chainsaw is uh that we've been focused on the road leading to power chainsaws for logging and construction. But you may well have seen a sort of viral Digiteau article floating around a couple of years ago talking about how the original invention of the chainsaw was as a medical device, invented for use in childbirth. Now, one of one of the really surprising things is that, in one sense this is true. In the eighteenth century there was such a thing as the obstetric chainsaw. However, as you might guess from the period, one big difference is that this was not a motorized device, which maybe makes this discovery even more alarming. Yeah, because when you you hear the words medical chainsaw, it sounds ridiculous and potentially grotesque, or it sounds like the sort of futurist extrapolation you find in sci fi, where you know, sometimes it will be like in the few sure chainsaws will be so small they can be used for surgical procedures. You know, that's where you're like, actually that that technology was not headed that direction, sci fi author. I'm not sure why you chose to focus on that, um, but you you you encounter that sort of thing in science fiction from time to Yeah, well, sometimes in sci fi medicine you just get little like wands, little magic wands, Like one magic wand just opens the body up for whatever kind of procedure, and then you touch the body with another glowing wand and it instantly heals. Yeah, like they basically had that technology and like Star Trek next generation. Uh oh, yeah, that's right, Jason. Next, here's a quick horror question for you, Joe. You're you're far better versed in the the Friday the Thirteenth world here at the film universe. Did Jason Voorhees ever picked up a chainsaw or did he just know that that would be gimmick infringement, that that that was why they faced his thing and he should back off. I believe this is a point a lot of people are confused on. As far as I know, Jason has never wielded a chainsaw. The closest he ever gets is, I believe in Friday thirteenth, part seven, which is the one when which he battles a girl with psychic powers. Uh and uh So that one's uh quite funny and a lot of fun. But in that one he does use a power saw, but it is not a chainsaw. It is a motor driven hedge trimmer with a circular saw at the end of a long pole. Uh. And he sticks it right into Terry Kaiser's abdomen. Okay, so that that that sounds right. He knew better. He knows better than to pick up the chainsaw. That's not his thing. He can have literally any other tool, but not the chainsaw. Right he he doesn't want to get into legal trouble. Plus, he's very much a stealth stalker type character, right right, Except I guess this thing does make noise. I mean, Jason generally does not go for for power tools. He prefers the classic, the manual implements the machete, the big old steak or spike. That's his territory, simple melee weapons. Yeah, all right, Well getting back to medical chainsaws then, Um, the the paper we're looking at for this came from uh skipping at all uh and it was It's titled the Chainsaw a Scottish Invention from the Scottish Medical Journal. Uh. This is uh what forty nine number two. This is from two thousand and four, So it's pointed out by Skipping at all in in in this paper. Uh. The interesting thing is that we have two different Scottish inventors in the eighteenth century who may have independently come up with the concept of a medical chainsaw off sorts, and we do have to caveat to have that caveat of sorts, and we're gonna get to something that more closely resembles what we might or at least checks off more of the boxes for what we think of as a chainsaw. Now again, we're not talking about tiny gas powered chainsaws. In fact, we're originally talking about a non mechanical invention. We're talking about a quote chain hand saw, a fine serrated linked chain which cut on the concave side. So this was handheld, hand powered, you pull it back and forth, very much in common with some of those chain based cutting techniques that we were talking about in the first episode, wouldn't you say? Yeah, like one of the power saw design and again this would not be powered. But one of the power saw designs we talked about in the previous episode was one where a tree would be cut down with a cutting chain, but the chain did not revolve around a fixed bar. Rather the chain rotated freely around the tree trunk to just saw right through it. Yeah. So the first of these inventions was devised in the early seventeen eighties by Scottish surgeon surgeon John Aikin Uh. It was intended for use in childbirth, specifically for a symenthusiastomy, in which the cartilage of the pubic synthesis is divided to widen the pelvis, allowing childbirth. UM. Now, this particular saw design UM was considered a promising method as it avoided potential damage to surrounding tissues if a scalpel was used UM, But it was seventeen ninety before the saw was produced and UH, as this paper explains, it was never really widely picked up. Okay, so that's one of the designs. The second was devised by Scottish surgeon James Jeffrey as a means of removing disease joints with having without having to result to full limb removal. And one of the notable things about this saw Jeffrey saw is that it actually did see a fair amount of use. It was a notable improvement over the stiff bone saw and a version was even used in neurosurgery and surgery. And indeed we did get to a mechanized version of this, So we went from something that again is like a chain that you pull back and forth to cut and then you end up with this thing that was called an osteotom and this was a hand cranked version of this that essentially had an infinite chain loop on it. You'd don't get and you would have it essentially would function like a little chainsaw. I mean you look at a picture of it and it looks like some sort of like a weird handheld steam punk uh chainsaw dagger. One of the interesting things discussed in this Scottish Medical Journal paper is the idea that these chains for trying to cut through bone with this little damage to the surrounding tissue as possible. We're uh, at least partially inspired by looking at watch chains from watches of the eighteenth century. Obviously these would be bigger than those though. Yeah. And and another big thing about this, uh, this innovation and ultimately this whole like this whole area of innovation, is that you want to move towards precision, but you you also want speed. Uh you're still performing. Um, you know, so either either you're performing you know, in some cases should be still would be talking about full limb removal, but otherwise you're you're trying to get in there and removed diseased and damaged pieces. And you want to get in and get out quickly as possible, but also as as precisely as possible. Yeah. And in the case of this obstetric procedure that would cut through part of the pelvis in order in order to widen the passage for childbirth, the symphysiotomy procedure from the eighteenth century, there was a pressure leading to this, which is that, of course, you know, there was a lot of mortality during childbirth at the time, and uh, the process of Cesyrian section at the time also had a high mortality rate for myers, and so this was an alternative that was seen as something that could possibly lead to better outcomes in saving the life of both the mother and the child during delivery. But again that one didn't really pick up so much, but the osteotome did. But as luck would have it, it was superseded by the giggly twisted wire saw in the late nineteenth century. So, uh, you know, even though the osteotome was was pretty advanced there for a minute, um, it was beat in the race by this other bit of sawing technology, the giggly twisted wires saw. It was ultimately cheaper and it waited the two main issues with the chainsaw, and that is breakage and the chain getting stuck in the bone. The giggly twisted wire saw was narrower and it provided a quicker cut, and if the wire was damaged it was easy to pull out and then you could just use a fresh length of the wire. So there you go. Early chainsaws in eighteenth century medicine, though again we must stress not not motorized chainsaws, but yeah, using chains for cutting bone. It does in fact go back to multiple inventions from the eighteenth century. I have to say that the just the just getting back to the like the frightening names of things. The giggly twisted wire Saw also sounds kind of terrifying. Uh. And maybe it's because giggly also sounds a little bit like giggles. It sounds a little maybe it makes me think of Dr Giggles. Uh. I'm not sure how this guy would have pronounced it. I think the guys that the wire saw was named after was Leonardo Gigli or this could be Jiguli or because remember there's that movie with like Ben Affleck and whoever in it it was, it was spelled the same way, and that one was called Gelie. But I don't know. I didn't see that one. I saw Dr Giggles instead. Well, she probably invested your time more wiser, I don't know, arguable, but I was looking that up. And of course Larry Drake was was great in that Larry greg was Drake always made for a nice villain. But I was I had in my mind that like the character's name was Giggles, like he was Dr Giggles, but now he's Dr Evan Rindle, Like that's not scary. Why why don't they calling Dr Giggles that you just said his name is Dr Giggles, we would have bought it. This is Steven Giggles, Yes, Steven Millhouse Giggles. I mean it's a horror movie. It's like you can get lean into it. I mean, just ask Um, ask Cronenberg. You know you need to actually make the names a little bit removed from reality. Yeah, I think Dickens had the right philosophy for naming characters. Just go full idiophones, like the character's name should sound like what they do. Miss Stirred, Jaggers, Dr Giggles, It's it's it's all right there, it's just waiting for you. But I guess we should come back to the topic of of early power saws leading up to the chainsaw in logging itself, in in logging and woodworking. So there was a source I mentioned in the previous episode that I just want to mention again because it's a good one and I've referred to it a number of times here. This is a book called Chainsaws, a History by David Lee with Mike acres Uh And as I mentioned in the last episode, there is a very photography focused book. It's just lots and lots of beautiful photographs of gorgeous, you know, nasty looking chainsaws, and in various poses of sitting on a log, sitting in a workshop, kind of rusty looking, maybe kind of threatening somehow, I don't know, even though nobody's wielding it. It's full of vibes. But of course, like the title would imply, this book does trace a lot about the early history of chainsaws and how we got to the first models that people today would recognize as a pansaw. You look at him and say, yeah, that's what a chainsaw is. So I think in this uh, in this story, we left off somewhere around the World War One era and uh, and I guess that's where we'll pick up. Lee writes about this period, noting that there was one thing during this era that was an attempt at mechanized solutions in logging that actually did not involve a cutting chain, but rather a wire. So this was something he calls the wire rope tree feller. Uh. And again it might not count as a sau since it doesn't have teeth. Instead, the idea was just to use rapidly moving metal wires to cut down trees by pure friction as the wire was sort of dragged across the wood surface. Now you can probably get some obvious disadvantages there. It's not going to be nearly as as good at cutting through the tree. But I mean, I don't know, maybe there's some trade off in that you wouldn't have to bother with sharpening it. You just realize, Okay, we're just gonna we're just gonna rub this wire all to hell. Yeah, well that's what I'd be afraid of. That wire gets all rubbed hell, and then what if it snaps? I mean, you have a cable like that snapping. Uh, it sounds like a very dangerous situation. Yeah, you wouldn't want to be standing near it. And here's another interesting idea that was apparently floated at some point. How about a metal wire heated by electricity. Okay, use the new technology of electricity to get that wire red hot, and then just let it burn right through the wood as you're sliding it across the trunk. Well, that does sound like typical um like electrical age enthusiasm. What can't electricity do for us? Uh? But yeah, that sounds awful because you're potentially just catching the trees on fire at that point, and there were some other things. He mentions there there was something called a power feller, which looks like it's sort of just a a saw that swings in an arc and and gradually cuts its way through a tree. So I think this would be one with a fixed blade, and then another one that had just a bunch of augers that were like drill or bore holes down at the tree at the at the ground level, so it would fall over and not even really leave a stump. But Lee highlights a big problem them with almost all of these existing designs, which is that they were in reality no more efficient or not much more efficient than a couple of experienced sawyers with a misery whip. I mean, as grueling as the labor was. You know, it's hard work out there in the forest with the two main cross cut saw working on a redwood. Uh this was a skill that people had developed and they've gotten really good and fast at it. And of course human bodies and human muscles are very versatile and bulky machines of this period are not very versatile. Uh So it might, you know, you might have a machine that can cut through a tree faster than a human or maybe not even maybe that might not even be true, but even if it can, might require a lot of set up and might have a lot of bulky equipment. You've got to move around and all that, and a lot of loggers were ultimately like, yeah, we we we've got our methods and they worked just fine, so we'll stick with those. But nevertheless, there were some, uh, some of these powered saws in the early twentieth century. One thing that's kind of interesting is that it seems like even after the creation of the gas engine, and even after some chainsaw prototypes had been proposed, a lot of logging ventures still seem to prefer huge gas powered drag saws, these ones with a solid blade that would just be working back and forth, powered by a motor. And I think the idea is that the big drag saw is uh is just rugged, it's dependable, it's it's you know, you know what you're getting there. It's it has less moving parts and less to get broken up than than a chainsaw does. But at the same time, the chainsaw has its own advantages. It's lighter, it's smaller, it's faster at cutting, especially once you have some revolutions that would come later in changes to the cutting surface, so changes to the teeth on the chain, and changes to the power source. But so, how do you get from this era where where largely the misery whip and then big old drag saws are still very popular, say in the twenties through the fifties, to the modern chainsaw era that we know and love today. Well, he writes that one of the first chainsaws made for forestry was a device called the Sector, which was invented by A. V. Westfeldt in Sweden in nineteen nineteen. Now, they're still some ways that this is not going to be much like a chainsaw that you would recognize today. For one thing, this model still separated the saw component from its power source. And the other thing is its shape. This is not like the chainsaws you're picturing that have a long bar with a chain that rotates around them. This one has a weird wishbone shape. So you've got to imagine a handle like on a shovel. But then that shovel handle splits into a y fork like a you know, a y peeler that you peel a potato with, And then at the two ends of the y fork are powered rollers that quickly rotate a cutting chain, and the rollers are powered by an outboard motor that is connected via a drive shaft that looks like this short thick tube. So you've got an outboard motor and then that's got a drive shaft leading to this y shaped thing that's got a shovel handle on the end and uh, and then you would use that to sort of I guess poke the peeler end, the y end at the tree where the chain would cut it. I'm looking at a picture of it now, and this is the most one of the most incomprehensible inventions I've ever looked at. Like, he's just it almost makes no sense that it. It looks like the sort of thing where the leather Face or Jason were to show up with it, you would just be like, no, no, go home, go home. Yeah yeah, laugh at leather Face. And then he gets all sad and the sad music plays and he walks off hanging his head and he need a friend, he needs some family members with him. Looks like to carry this thing. Yeah. Apparently that was one of the things that really interfered with pickup of the sector, because the separate outboard motor made this model quite difficult to use. Like any you want to reposition it, you might have to reposition the two parts, and so it just looks like a real pain. Yeah. But you and see the beginning here, you can see how okay, once you have this device. Uh, if you were to refine this quite a bit, we could move towards something more like what we'd imagine a chainsaw being now. Like a lot of the things we talk about on this show, Uh, it's one of those inventions that comes about by iteration and combination, So it is hard to identify a single inventor or moment of invention for the chainsaw. Instead, it's like a lot of things kind of changing over time to look more and more like what we consider a chainsaw today. Uh. And it's a process that goes roughly from the mid nineteenth century until about nineteen twenty, by which time we finally start to get stuff that looks like a modern chainsaw. And one of the first commercially successful chainsaws of this form we would recognize today is the Wolf. It's just serendipity that they have these great names, because this wasn't like a brand name somebody came up with. It was actually a dude's name. This was Yeah. This was a machine produced by a firm founded in nineteen twenty by an American engineer named Charles wolf Wolf was born in eighteen seventy one. I've seen a claim a couple of places that wolf was involved in the creation of the first modern submarine for the U. S. Navy under the direction of John Holland in the eighteen nineties. Uh So this was mentioned in Lee's book, and I saw it referenced in another article. But I was looking for I don't know more solid historical information on that, and I couldn't find it. So I don't know about that, but I have at least seen that claimed. But whether or not he had submarine experience, According to his son, Jerome, Charles Wolfe was an extremely experienced engineer who had worked on a number of different types of projects. So he worked on electric railways, on transportation infrastructure like bridges and tunnels, he worked on dams and and water systems. And he had some experience in the nineteen auts and in the nineteen tens with sawmills and lumber, and at some point while he was working in the lumber world, he came across a prototype chainsaw that was never put into commercial production, but then the the idea apparently stuck with him, and then eventually, along with an electrical engineer named Frank Redman, Wolf came up with a design for an electrically powered chainsaw of basically the form we see today. So it's a cutting chain that moves along the outside of a flat bar. It's driven by an electrically powered sprocket with teeth based on the classic design of the cross cut saw blade. The teeth of the cutting chain, not the teeth of the sprocket. Sorry, And this would be the wolf, Rob. I've attached a picture of the wolf for you to look at. Um. The company would go on to develop many subsequent variations. They eventually had a compressed air driven model, and I think eventually, many years later even in an internal combustion model. But this electric chainsaw really seems like the granddaddy. Yeah. I mean, you look at this and you're told that this is the wolf, and you you agree this is the wolf. This looked this This is a brutal looking tool right here. It looks like the kind of thing that's some sort of like a futuristic um cave troll would wield in some sort of you know, a combat scenario. It's a and and and and also it weirdly looks like it has a screaming face on the I guess what we might infer to be the pommel or the or part of the hilt of the chainsaw. Where's the screaming face? I'm not seeing it. Oh, look at the turn your head sideways. Oh body, And then the at the top is this head that's kind of going. It's not cutting a muppet face. No, no, no no, it's not screaming. It's singing an angelic chorus of joy for the power that is now in your hands. But yeah, you're you're absolutely right. This does look like something that would be like fused onto the wrist of a super mutant in in whatever kind of waste land or um or Actually, this looks like this should be what Leatherface was carrying instead of that green chainsaw that nobody remembers the color of. But he would have he would have needed electricity for it, right, Well, yeah, I guess at least this first model. Yeah, that that would make it probably difficult to run around in the That would be a great scene. Like he's about to get you, but then he runs a little bit too far and it unplugs chainsaw. Than the one thing that's interesting to note, so we think of the chainsaw as being primarily for logging, for you know, taking down trees and bucking them out in the forest. Uh. Those several sources I've looked at note that the wolf did not actually take over the logging business. That you might call this the first commercially viable, commercially mass produced chainsaw, but it was really more popular for work with prepared lumber, for example, in construction. It's real advantage was that it could quickly make fine, accurate cut us and in the decades following this, other mass producers would enter the games, such as German companies like Steele and Dolmar and more and more. So the chainsaw is on its way now, but we need actually one more major innovation before it really takes over the logging world. And this is what brings us to Joe Cox and the so called bug chain. Uh. So I I loved when I came across this story because who would have thought it. Even the history of the chainsaw has important episodes of bio mimetic engineering in it. Um, so, yes, let us speak of the bug chain. So in the nineteen forties, uh, the misery whip was still in wide use in the United States, even though plenty of power saws had been brought to market by this time. Uh. And for a while, I think you could blame this on power saws being too big, too bulky, too delicate, dependent on external power sources and so forth. But by the forties you had better designs, you had more compact internal bustion designs, and yet there were still problems. And so here I want to start referring to a paper that I was reading called a Lesson from Nature Joe Cox and his Revolutionary Saw Chain by Ellis Lucia. Now, Lucia says that one big problem with with widespread take up of the chainsaw was problems with the cutting chain. Uh. These chains of the nineteen forties were modeled on the blades of traditional cross cut saws. So if you picture a misery whip or one of these cross cut saws, you can probably see it in your mind that it has these these sharp, sort of razor sharpened teeth that would be dragged through the curve. Remember that's the cut part of the tree trunk to cut to knock away wood essentially by scratching at it with a sharp surface. So Lucia compares this to rapidly dragging the tip of a knife for a sharp nail over the wood. And so, of course this does work for sawing things if you apply enough force, but Lucius has actual there was a lot of waste, and the cutting teeth on the chains would tend to get dull very fast, so this again led to a lot of wasted time having to re sharpen dull chains, and so in many cases, loggers thought that the old cross cut saws were still more efficient even as late as the nineteen forties, but Lucia writes that this was up ended by changes in the saw chain design that could be traced back to this American logger and engineer named Joe Cox uh so short bio on Joe Cox. It seems like he had about a million jobs. He was born in Oklahoma in nineteen o five. He left home at sixteen to work in railroad shops in Colorado, and then from here he uh He went on through apprenticeships and self teaching to become a qualified machinist. He worked at an auto agency and did a bus line where he learned a lot about mechanics and engine repair. And then he worked building a gas line in San Francisco. And then he helped to build, according to this article, some powdered milk processing plants, which I assume we're somewhere in northern California or near San Francisco, which makes me wonder, could Joe Cox have been involved in building the Northern California dairy works plant that is featured in Halloween three ah, the one that's supposed to be the silver shamrock Factory. No answer on that, but I am mighty intrigued. But he operated a welding shop in Arizona. He did auto repair, he was an electrician. I did some wiring in homes uh, he designed a home water heater or product. And he did some welding for some oil drilling concerns in Texas. But then he eventually moved along with his brother to Oregon, where they got involved in the logging industry. And it was here, working as a logger and a logging engineer, that he noticed there was plenty of room to improve, to improve on the chains being used in these less than impressive power saws of the day. And this article actually has an interview with Joe Box. It was written at a time when when he was still alive. So I want to include some of his quotes because they're great. I like the way he talks. Uh he's describing working with his brother in the Oregon logging industry, and he says, we fell limbed and bucked small frozen, naughty pine timber and three ft of snow our first winter here. We were paid fifty cents a thousand. We earned about four dollars in ten hours of hard work. And it was hard. And so the way Cox tells the story, one morning he and his brother were working out somewhere east to the Cascades, and they were asked to try out a new power saw, which was a stump saw mounted on wheels with the chain allegedly driven by a motorcycle engine. Which that that's cool, that that's hacking. And Cox says that they could immediately see that this power saw was just not very good, like they could actually fall a tree quicker with the hand saw. And then I want to again read his direct quote. This seems strange to me because the power saw had plenty of stuff. Uh So, I think he's saying by that that he recognizes that the motor that's driving it is powerful and should outperform human muscles if the cutting edge were better, if that were more efficient, And he goes on, I was a pretty fair filer at the time and figured that if I could make a power saw cut as efficiently as a cross cut, it should practically fall through the wood. It just made sense. And with such a cutting tool, sawing timber would be a lot easier. And so, according to this story, Cox tells he had a breakthrough one day when he was out in the woods and he whacked a rotten stump with an axe, accidentally revealing a cavity in the wood that had been made by the larvae of a well known and much reviled insect of the area, the timber beetle or air Gotti's spiculadas. I looked this insect up, but apparently it's also known as the pine sawyer beetle. It has a very large, very beautiful, disgustingly beautiful, almost raucous belonging uh larval form that I don't know, Rob, how would you describe this creature? Um? Yeah, I think that all matches up, but also just screams protein. Like if you're a bird, you're excited looking at these photos. You just PLoP one of these in a hot dog bun and you're set. Yeah, I mean, you know, it looks in a way, it looks like a big old shrimp. Shrimp of the woods. Yeah, that's freshman catch of the day. Uh So. One of the photos I found of this thing is of somebody holding one in their hand and it's like it's as big as the palm of their hand. Almost. Yeah, it's this is a big, big boy, for sure. I didn't have time to research this, but I am curious now if this particular um larva is edible by humans. So I don't know. If there any foragers out there, they can let us know, email us. Okay, now here, I want to read directly a section from Lucia's article, because this is wonderful. So Lucia writes, the larvae of the beetle cursed in the kind of verbiage formerly applied to oxen by the old bull whackers, have an amazing ability for cutting and destroying huge quantities of timber. Although the busy grub is hardly the size of a stout man's finger. I don't know that that seems sizeable to me. Continuing, the hated grub turns good timber into sawdust, and it doesn't matter whether the trees are alive or sound snags and windfalls that might be salvaged. The winged adult beetle deposits its eggs beneath the bark of a dead tree, or, when faced with an overpopulation problem, under the bark of living trees. The vast Tillamook, Burn and the other regional forest disasters promised feasts that would last the timber beetle and his offspring many generations, although the way they worked, wholesale destruction of salvageable timber might be accomplished in a few brief years. So this larva is a workhorse. And Cox claims he was looking at this little larva and and marveling at it, and wondering how it was so good at tunneling through the stiff fibers of tree trunks, And so he hells that he armed himself with a magnifying glass and began to study closely the cutting and boring behavior of this grub, and what he discovered was that rather than scraping or scratching at the wood straight ahead, instead the larva would move side to side, sort of shaving out parts of the wood with C shaped jaws. And so inspired by the jaws of this larva, Cox went on to design a cutting chain for saws based on exactly this type of action. So I was trying to understand exactly what the difference was here, and I think I finally got it. So the chains that came before tended to have these cutting teeth, sharp teeth which would scrape at the wood like a knife, and they would alternate with what we're called raker teeth, which were these hook shaped bumps designed to scoop away debris after it had been cut away from the wood by the sharp teeth, and that would clear out the curve. Okay, that that's the old design. But I found the new design described in an article written for Offbeat Oregon, which is like an Oregon based or a weird local history column, and this was written by Finn J. D. John in September called watching Bugs and a Stump led to the modern chainsaw, and John describes the new design Cox's design like this. The cutting teeth were hook shaped chisels that would bite into the wood and essentially carve away chips. And those chips were big enough and clean enough that rakers weren't necessary to clear them out of the curve. Finding the chisels too tended to grab too much wood, Joe added a bump in the metal just in front of the chisel on each link of the chain. By filing down the bump or gauge, he could control how big a bite each chisel took. And then I found a picture also for us to look at rob So it looks like with with Joe Cox's design, the cutting side is on the top of this diagram you're looking at now. So what it looks like is the cutting side has these little sort of curved chisels, the cutting teeth or tube shaped blades, alternating from one side of the chain to the other, so shaving out a little tube shaped chip on the left and then doing one on the right, back and forth forever. So I think the difference is that instead of cutting like a sharp bladed saw, just like a knife point, this would shave out a kind of thin tunnel. And apparently the chain that Jocox designed cut faster and more cleanly than the chains that came before and needed less resharpening, so this was a clear improvement. He patented his design and eventually he founded a firm called the Oregon Saw Chain Corporation, which was later known as Omark, which would become a multimillion dollar company and would revolutionize the power saw business. And at this point, by the nineteen fifties, I think this is when we hit the turning point and there's really no going back from the chain saw to the misery whip. I guess unless you were just trying to make a point or something there there would be no Texas miss three whip massacre. Thank well, I think this is a great place to come come back to the Texas chainsaw massacre, and and also just to discuss, like what is the cultural trajectory of the chainsaw from here on out. I was reading a bit about this in the The icon City of Chainsaws from the Backyard to the Barbecue by Christopher Curry, and he writes the following quote, two years nineteen fifty and nineteen seventy four are vital in understanding the icond city of the petrol powered handheld, single operator chainsaw nineteen fifty was the year in which the tool was introduced to the American market. It was a backyard revolution. Men were empowered with a remarkable new technology for clearing undergrowth, trimming branches, and felling trees. Okay, so you no longer need to be an experienced logger or have a bloody to work the misery whip with you. Just one person with one power tool can go out there and master the landscape exactly now seventy four that he mentions that, of course, is when Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes out. And that's that's a that's kind of where he keeps, you know, ping pawing back and forth between like the cultural role of the chainsaw and how it is reflected in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Uh. And and I think it's it's worth driving home here that Uh. If you don't know much about the Texas Chainsaw Masacre, maybe you've seen it. You've seen it once, you know, you saw years ago. It's easy to dismiss it and think it's just this, it's just this shocking work that's about titilation. But Toby Hooper had he had political ambitions in creating the film, like he wanted to make a political film that wasn't about politics. He wanted. So it's not a film that is just about chainsaws roaring, you know, in in the rural setting and chasing people and blood and screams. Um. It is trying to say something and I think, you know, arguably it does a fantastic job doing so tell me more. Okay, so uh, Curry writes the chainsaw. Though during this period it was imbued with the power of both a status symbol and a phallic symbol for it's predominantly male users of this time. Additionally, it became a thoroughly American symbol of status and power, as quote cutting down trees. It is an especially significant part of American history, which which is true. I mean that is part of the the story of the colonization of North America by Westerners by Europeans. Um. And then you know, what do you have? You have these expansive forests. What do you do with those expansive forests, Well, you start cutting them down? Um and uh. And And of course to a certain instance, that makes sense because what does would give you Wood gives you homes, it gives you it gives you ships, it gives you, um, you know, all these things you can create out of it, all your tools, but also would meant fuel as well. And so here comes the chainsaw. Uh and it allows you to harvest uh material and and uh and fuel for energy production. Quote. Such a radical technological transformation of the basic means to cut down trees sitles up alongside such intrinsically American notions as self determination, manifest destiny, the logging industry, and the myth of frontier. And so from here, Curry goes on to argue that the Texas chainsaw massacre massacre very much builds on all of this. The Sawyer family, the chainsaw family, if you will, in the Texas chainsaw massacre, cannibalism and murder aside, they are a rural version of the American dream. They are entrepreneurs doing what they have to do to survive in the face of economic and social change. Yes they're they're rather self sufficient, aren't they. Yeah? Yeah, And and this again this is very much intentional on on on Toby Hooper's part commenting on consumer culture and the chainsaw is all about consumption. Again, either in its intended role is that of a tool for the consumption of trees for the for the material uses and for fuel uses, or in this extrapolated fantastic role as a weapon of murder and dismemberment. So you know, it ultimately becomes a situation. It's easy to lose this because we were so fascinated with the idea of the chainsaw as weapon. But it's like leather face is is is felling humans. It's humans as trees cut down to sustain others, because I remember they weren't just It wasn't just about cutting up um teenagers from the city. It was about making barbecue out of them. It's supply and demand. Now. One thing I've never noticed before we did this episode is that the family in the Texas Chainsaw mask Are are are named the Sawyers, which the sawyers are the people who work the saws in the log mystry. I never put that together either until Manning Manning the Misery whip their Sawyers. It does follow the Dickens convention, it does it does what do they do? They saw Um? I was also thinking a bit about the line the saw is family. Um. I think that's predominantly from sexus. Chainsaw mask are two right, part of a fun little bit of a grizzly dialogue in there. But the idea that the saw is family and what is the saw? Uh? As Curry points out in this article, the saw is consumption. Look, the saw is this way of life through consumption. So, of course the Saws family, and I think this is ultimately a rather abiding commentary on the American way of life. You know, our lives are consumption. You cannot separate consumption from all of these other ideals of what we are and what we want out of the world, out of, out of life, and out of like just the raw substance of the country. Yeah, okay, And so if this is the intended point, it makes sense that you would use the chainsaw, because I think we were talking about this at the very beginning of the first episode, something about the the aesthetic impression made by the chainsaw is kind of alarming at the rate at which it like goes through things. Yeah, absolutely, Uh you know. I also I had to look up the exact quote from TCM two because it's it's actually pretty good. This is Drayton, uh, the old one of the older member of the family, not the old old man who can you know, barely move, but the uh, the the the the younger old man in the family, and he's telling leather face, He's saying, you have one choice, boy sex or the saw sex as well. Nobody knows, but the saw, the saw is family. So that that kind of gets into the sort of these uh, these phallic ideas too, and the masculine aspects that are tied up in the chainsaw and its role in the American culture. The idea that on one level you have you have potential creation, um, but but who knows what comes with creation? Creation is a risk. But consumption we know exactly where consumption goes. We know where where the saw leads to. That is the safe way, that is the traditional way, and of course that is the way that the Sawyer family sticks to. The saws yet another Texas Chili cook Off competition trophy. You know. Coming back to the to the technological side, one of the things that really interests me in reading that the story of Joe Cox and the redesign of the chainsaw blade is that we managed to have all these decades of people having the idea to apply new types of power motors and engines to drive saws, to like make sawing more powerful, to outstrip what could be done by human muscles, but going so long in this process without making the significant improvements to the cutting chain like Joe Cox would um that would eventually revolutionize the power saw business. It I don't know it, Uh, something seems metaphorically significant there as well. Yeah, and and it also perfect that they turned to to larvae to to get this answer, because you know, what are what do larvae do? They can soume, that's all they do, Like, that's the job of a larva is to consume and grow bigger so that it can take on the next stage of it's of its life. So in a way, it's like the perfect spirit animal for the chainsaw as well. So I feel like these episodes have forced me to think long and hard about to to rethink the role of the chainsaw in Texas Chainsaw Mask. But there's plenty of other room to to, you know, to consider as well, like what how do we interpret the chainsaw in the Evil Dead movies? What does that mean? Why? Why is it groovy? And is it truly groovy? I don't know, Oh, that seems very different somehow. When Ash picks up the chainsaw, the wheeled against the demons or the dead eyes that almost seems like it is somehow an emblem of human civilization and human technology, the good and ordered part of the world, which you know is is the one thing you can hold to sort of like man the gates of Thermopoli against uh, I don't know, against the advancing magical deem uh, you know, whatever you call it. Where do the dead eyes come from? I don't even remember, um from the dead world? I don't know that the hell. Maybe they're not here. They're bad. They're not bad, I mean, they are not they're not human. Yeah, it's also worth thinking about the fact that we've tried we're talking about like in a leather face um area, and also in this sort of again coming back to this uh, this sort of masculine interpretation of the chainsaw on American culture very much, this idea that like the chainsaw as extension of of of human identity and the human body, Ash actually makes the chainsaw a part of his body, right, replacing his hand with a chainsaw um, which is of course wonderfully you know, on brand and over the top, especially for the third movie. Oh yeah, what does it say that your hand can be possessed by a demon? But your chainsaw. Can't. Yeah, like the the hand is corruptible. The chainsaws beyond corruption. Don't trust the flesh, trust the saw. All right, Well, there you have it, the chainsaw, the invention of the chainsaw, and and hopefully more than enough um seasonal horror consideration thrown in there as well to keep things uh nice and HALLOWEENI In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you know where to find them. Check the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Artifact on Wednesday, listener mail on Monday, and then on Friday we do Weird How Cinema. That's our chance to to just really uh, you know, bear down and talk about a weird movie uh for an extended period of time, and then over the weekend we usually run a vault episode, which is here We run huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact That's Stuff to Blow Your mind dot com. Stuff to blow your mind is production of I heart Radio more podcasts, my heart Radio. It's the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

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