All looked at Falkenberg, and then at me. It was my turn now.
“A single man can push a goods truck with full load on rails,” I said. “And here there'll be two men to work a saw with the blade running on two rollers over oiled steel guides. It'll be easier to work than the old type of saw—a single man could work it, if it came to a pinch.”
“It sounds almost impossible.”
“Well, we shall see.”
Frøken Elisabeth asked half in jest:
“But tell me—I don't understand these things a bit, you know—why wouldn't it be better to saw a tree across in the old way?”
“He's trying to get rid of the lateral pressure; that's a strain on the men working,” explained the Captain. “With a saw like this you can, as he says, make a horizontal cut with the same sort of pressure you would use for an ordinary saw cutting down vertically. It's simply this: you press downwards, but the pressure's transmitted sideways. By the way,” he went on, turning to me, “has it struck you there might be a danger of pressing down the ends of the blade, and making a convex cut?”
“That's obviated in the first place by these rollers under the blade.”
“True; that goes for something. And in the second place?”
“In the second place, it would be impossible to make a convex cut with this apparatus even if you wanted to. The blade, you see, has a T-shaped back; that makes it practically impossible to bend it.”