Broadaxe to Flying Shear: The Mechanization of Forest Harvesting East of the Rockies

The late Dr. C. Ross Silversides was a respected forester who worked in woodlands operations, both with private interests and the Canadian Forestry Service, before lending his expertise in forest mechanization to the National Research Council of Canada. The core material for Broadaxe to Flying Shear originated from Silversides’s unpublished manuscript on technological development in the forest industry during his career, a career that stretched from World War II to his retirement in 1981. Several scholars persuaded the National Museum of Science and Technology to honor Silversides by including his extensive narrative as one of the museum’s Transformation Series of occasional papers.

Since the Silversides manuscript was designed specifically for forestry practitioners and students, especially those involved in harvesting, forest historian Richard A. Rajala (University of Victoria) was asked to provide a section placing mechanization into a historical context, and renewable-resource specialist Peter J. Murphy (University of Alberta) provided an afterword on developments in the last two decades. In this way it was hoped the readership would include not only forest professionals, but historians of technology and those in the public with an interest in forestry and forest harvesting. This book by committee has partially succeeded in its aim.

Because Silversides’s professional career dealt with forests east of the Rockies, he did not pretend to speculate on mechanization in the British Columbia forests. His thesis maintains that serious mechanization in the Canadian timber industry began only in the last half century, but was then followed by exponential change. This change first took place in the pulp and paper industry, progressing only gradually into related timber areas.

Without doubt, Silversides was a leader in his field. His description of the evolution of machinery to make pulp and paper operations less labor-intensive and more efficient is encyclopedic. Using a decade-by-decade chronology, the harvesting expert introduces and describes, with accompanying diagrams and photographs, the myriad of machines engineered to conquer the forests of Canada east of the Rockies. The detail is prolific enough to warrant its use as a benchmark reference for any scholar or layperson searching for information on the mechanization of forest harvesting, especially involving the pulp and paper industry. But the detailed prose requires concentration for comprehension.

The historical perspective provided by Rajala makes Broadaxe to Flying Shear understandable to a general audience. However, the chosen sequence places the more detailed and complicated Silversides material before Rajala’s general history. This may turn off a potential nonexpert audience, which does not understand how the essentially post-World War II mechanization fits into the history of timbering.

With few exceptions, the historiography of the timber industry in Canada has concentrated on colonial British North America and Canada until World War II. Prime examples are sources dealing with lumber in particular, such as Graeme Wynn’s Timber Colony: A Historical Geography of Early Nineteenth Century New Brunswick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), or resource-based volumes such as H. V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines and Hydro-electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1974). More recent scholarly pursuits, such as William Parenteau’s excellent Ph.D. dissertation, “Forest and Society in New Brunswick: The Political Economy of the Forest Industries” (University of New Brunswick, 1994), also concentrate on the pre-World War II years.

Broadaxe to Flying Shear does not pretend to be anything but a contribution to the existing literature on the forest industry in eastern Canada. As Herbert I. Winer from the Pulp and Paper Institute of Canada implies, this depth of concentrated material on the mechanization of the timber industry will provide “a solid foundation for future studies” (p. viii).