The chainsaw’s history reads like a mid-career pivot gone sideways. Per HowStuffWorks, the first ones were late-1700s surgical bone saws, which included a fine serrated loop of links with a handle at each end, pulled by hand to divide a pelvis during obstructed labor, not to drop a pine tree. Yikes. (Click the link at HowStuffWorks above to read more about that)
The jump to timber took another century and a chain of tinkerers: San Francisco logger Samuel J. Bens filed his “endless-chain saw” patent in 1905 (granted 1908) and openly said it was based on Bernhard Heine’s osteotome; Canadian James Shand patented a “portable” version in 1918 that was portable only in the way a piano is; then Andreas Stihl patented an electric saw in 1926 and a gas one in 1929, both two-person affairs. The first one-man chainsaw didn’t arrive until 1950, and it was still a heavy brute — the average saw weighed around 12 kg by 1959, versus 4–5 kg for a typical modern one. So the tool spent roughly 170 years learning to be a logging implement and only got genuinely handy about 70 years ago. Even the Heine osteotome that inspired the whole woodcutting branch was a $300 hand-cranked curiosity almost no surgeon could operate, and was never used for childbirth at all.
What finally tipped it was mostly unglamorous engineering: diaphragm carburetors that let a saw run at any angle without stalling, lighter materials, and a centrifugal clutch that let one pair of hands do what had taken two. That’s the difference Montana woodcutters felt — the two-man saw and the crosscut became a chore you could hand to one person with a truck and an afternoon.
For the Montana firewood cutter, the one-person saw turned a season’s work into a weekend. The old math was brutal: cutting a cord of firewood by hand with a crosscut takes on the order of 25 hours and roughly 12,900 calories, versus about 5.5 hours and 1,500 calories with a chainsaw — a side-by-side test that measured the gap at about a fifth of the time and a ninth of the human effort. Post-1950s, that meant a household could pull its winter heat out of a nearby dead stand instead of buying it, and a single cutter could work alone, at any angle, without a partner on the other handle. The permit was cheap, the truck did the hauling, and the saw did the rest — which is roughly how 7% of Montana households, some 33,000, ended up heating primarily with wood, third-highest share in the nation.
Which makes Montana’s devotion to the thing more interesting. The state’s logging camps were photographed before the chainsaw existed, with Bitterroot Valley crews in 1910–1920 working axes, crosscuts, horses and logging railroads. The rugged timber heritage we romanticize is a hand-tool heritage; the chainsaw is a mid-century arrival that quietly rewrote the household end of it. Today the job description is firewood, trails and sawlogs: the state’s 2025 harvest totaled 264 million board feet, 154 million of it off Forest Service land, and DNRC stewards 793,000 acres of forested state trust land. Hence the autumn ritual: drive to a national forest, pick up a firewood permit at the local ranger station, and spend a Saturday converting a 1780s surgical instrument into a heating appliance — the only tool in your garage with an obstetrics residency in its history….maybe….hopefully.
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