Hasta La Ideas

We human beings enjoy making things rectilinear, which is why you’re reading this on a glass rectangle while sitting at a wooden rectangle in a rectangle-shaped room that you entered by passing through a rectangle. So as soon as we could figure out how to turn trees into neat wooden rectangles, we did, by eventually coming up with the circular saw blade and the sawmill.

But before the circular saw blade became the preferred method for turning logs into boards, we tried some pretty kooky things, like this:

That ten-bladed monstrosity is a steam-powered vertical frame saw, and some American yahoo invented it in 1801. Depending on how the blades were spaced, it could provide boards of different thicknesses.

By 1809 the invention had spread to England, and by 1821, the Netherlands. In Dutch the machine was called a “raamzaag,” literally, “window saw,” as the manual one-bladed version it was based on looked like a window frame bisected by a saw. Several years ago the Dutch Steam Engine Museum actually restored one and got it working. The video they shot of it isn’t terribly thrilling, but does give you an idea of what an ordeal it was to operate the thing:

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