Electric chainsaws may currently be all the rage, even as many forestry professionals remain sceptical of their capabilities. But one electric design already proved its worth in the woods some 80 years ago.
ALTHOUGH born in Hammond, Indiana in 1895, Arthur W. Mall was brought up in Chicago, Illinois. The Mid-West capital was expanding rapidly and immigrants from Europe and the rural areas of the United States were swelling the city’s population.
Family sources reported that at the end of the school day, Arthur would spend a couple of hours on the streets of Chicago selling the evening edition of the city newspaper to earn a dollar or two.
While a few of his schoolmates could go to college after graduating from high school, the economic position of the Mall family precluded this for their offspring, so Arthur left school and went to work. The family archivists do not specify the positions he took, but can assure that after his day’s work was done, his time was not wasted. Regular attendance at evening classes allowed him to apply to the Officer Candidate School for the US Navy. He passed the stringent examination and was trained to the equivalent of a college degree in mechanical engineering.
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When the United States entered World War I in 1916, Arthur W. Mall was called up for active service. He left the Navy with the rank of ensign. The registration of the Mall Tool Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1921 – with a capital of just $200 – appears to be the next record of his whereabouts. It is certain, however, that he was back in South Side Chicago a year later with new premises and an expanded workforce.
The Mall Tool Company’s hand-held pneumatic sanding and polishing wheel was taking the Mid-West’s rapidly expanding fabricating industries by storm. Whether the end products were the new ‘horseless carriages’, railroad locomotives and freight cars or agricultural implements, finishing the job after the heavy metal bashing was done was so much easier and quicker with Mall’s invention.
A wide range of motor-manual tools for the manufacturing and construction industries followed; with gasoline and electricity supplementing the compressed-air power source.
Mall’s first heavy chainsaws were powered by gasoline engines with classic float carburettors – the engine unit remained upright in use but gearing allowed the bar and chain to be set to cut either vertically or horizontally.
While these early designs still provide excitement for vintage chainsaw enthusiasts, it was not ground-breaking technology. Many US motor engineers – and a fair few in Canada – were already fitting a couple of handlebars and a throttle control to small gas engines and getting them to run a scratcher chain around a grooved bar. A product designed by the Mall Tool Company during World War II, however, was to prove the company had not lost its flair for innovation.
Production was now based in Crete, Illinois in the newest of the Mall Tool Company’s facilities, about 30 miles south of Chicago. The details of the negotiations between the US government and the tool producer were, understandably, shrouded in confidentiality; there was, after all, a war going on.
When the US Navy and Marines clawed back territory from the Japanese Imperial Forces in the Pacific – island by island – the Mall Tool Company’s new electric chainsaw was somewhere on the quartermaster’s list when the landing craft brought the kit ashore.
The clearance of aircraft landing strips was key to consolidating the territorial gains. After the Mall saws had felled the trees, the small crawler tractors – that had supplied their power by fast-idling their shaft-mounted generators – could get to work hauling the timber out of the way and firming up a makeshift runway.
While there may be little photographic evidence of the saw’s operation at the height of the war in the Pacific theatre of operations, back in the States the performance of the machine recently delivered from the works in Crete, Illinois was recorded by USDA foresters. The Forest Service, since its inception in the early 20th century, had encouraged its officers to make photographic records of all the work that was being carried out by the agency.
The Mall Tool Company’s electric saw was recorded cutting spruce in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska at the same time similar models were working in the jungles on the far side of the Pacific Ocean. These, however, were still operations to support the war effort.
While the US and Canada had been able to combine resources to increase the supply of aluminium for aircraft construction, Britain remained desperately short of the metal and had appealed to its allies across the Atlantic for supplies of ‘aircraft spruce’.
The Air Ministry in London had recently approved a design it had rejected outright a few years before. Aircraft designer Geoffrey De Havilland had resubmitted a military version of the award-winning twin-engine Comet Racer of the 1930s to comply with the specifications of one of the ministry’s tenders for a fast, light bomber. The airframe was essentially constructed from timber and bringing the Mosquito, as it came to be known, into full production eased the pressure on aluminium supplies.
Craftsmen experienced in aluminium fabrication were in short supply in the aircraft production factories. Those that signed up with the RAF were occupied full time on repairing damaged aircraft or adapting them to be compliant with the latest Air Ministry modifications. Experienced joiners, on the other hand, were available and could quickly adapt their skills to timber airframe construction.
As soon as the De Havilland Mosquito took to the air, the authorities were convinced the design far exceeded the specifications of a high-altitude light bomber and high-speed special operations aircraft. Orders were quickly placed with the allies in North America for large quantities of high-quality spruce to maintain the production runs for what was to become one of Britain’s most effective fighter aircraft.
Otto Schallerer, who ran a private photography business in Ketchikan, Alaska, had been regularly contracted by the officers of the US Ranger Districts in the Tongass National Forest to make photographic records of the works carried out on behalf of the citizens of the US. He duly attended in an unspecified location to document aircraft spruce being felled by a team of fallers equipped with the new Mall electric chainsaw.
Schallerer was paid for his time by the Forest Service, and it was a useful income to supplement the revenue of his portrait photography and the sale of postcards of the scenic views around Alaska’s Inland Passage. The images he produced, as he was working on US government service, would pass into the public domain. The rolls of film – as was the case with serving foresters – were despatched to Forest Service Headquarters in Washington, DC, where Leland J. Prater, a Forest Service photographer, was in the process of collating the huge number of images acquired since the National Forest system was founded by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Despite the mammoth task he was entrusted with – by 1955 the bank of images was up to 500,000 – Prater still found time to travel throughout the National Forests recording the natural and working environment. After retirement in 1966, Leland J. Prater continued to catalogue the images of the USDA Forest Service until the 1990s.
Otto Schallerer’s photographic studio on Main Street, Ketchikan, after a few changes of ownership, survived until 2006. The advent of digital photography saw a collapse in the number of rolls of film being developed and the business was no longer viable. But what of the Mall Tool Company?
During World War II, Arthur W. Mall started to purchase farmland near Monee Village in the vicinity of his large works in Crete, Illinois. The value of the land was placed in trust to be awarded as homesteadings for his workers, who had been called up for wartime service. Those returning, however, invariably preferred to take a cash settlement, so the trust was dissolved and 10 experimental tenanted farms were set up on the land.
A correspondent for the Chicago Daily Tribune reported in December 1952 that the farmers bred pedigree Hampshire hogs and beef cattle and 1,000 gallons of milk was supplied daily to the Chicago creameries. A large picnic grove (with modern restrooms, outdoor grills and a children’s playground) had been established in the 800 acres of woodland for the use of the company’s employees and their families.
Already, it was reported, 40,000 coniferous trees had been established and another 60,000 native American trees were due to be planted in the following few years. There were plans to stock the lakes with fish, build a hunting lodge and develop an arboretum.
Yet three years later, the Mall Tool Company and all its assets were sold and Arthur W. Mall was running a small engineering workshop on the outskirts of town.
The buyer, as it turned out, was the Remington Arms Company, and rumours abounded that it was only interested in the Mall chainsaws. The company’s armaments had, of course, been much in demand during the war years and Remington had been turning in impressive profits. The cessation of hostilities led to a major strategic rethink and Remington turned its arms not into ploughshares, but into gasoline-powered chainsaws.
Until Arthur W. Mall’s death in 1959, the chainsaws were produced under the Remington Mall brand.
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