The clanking of the mills ...

Wood: The term “Stone Age” suggests that humans in distant memory primarily worked on rocks to master their lives. However, wood used to be a major material for constructive work as well. The oldest discovered wooden object that had been worked on is the fragment of a polished board from a Paleolithic excavation site in Israel that’s estimated to be about 780,000 years old. Even as far back as in the Stone Age, humans had tools such as simple drills, scrapers, axes, hatches, and cleavers, or splitters. The first sawlike tools were serrated hand-axes for cutting thin branches perpendicular to the fiber. Sawing as we know it today was only possible with metallic saw blades. The oldest examples of metallic saws were found in Egypt: small fragments of bronze saws with fine and coarse toothing. The first known mechanical sawmill in the 3rd century was a Roman water-powered stone saw mill in today’s Turkey in which a rotary motion was translated into a linear motion by means of a crankshaft and connecting rod. A similar principle was used in the Venetian saw featuring a single vertically cutting saw blade, driven by a slow-moving water wheel – invented, among others, by Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci at the beginning of the 16th century. Finally, the industrial revolution put the power of steam also into saw mills. It helped achieve the breakthrough of the multiple-blade saw that was able to simultaneously cut various board thicknesses. However, the new design was struggling at first due to fears that the new, more powerful machines might cause ruin for the small saw mills. In the end, though, technological progress prevailed. Today’s industrial saw mills are high-tech lines with state-of-the-art digital measuring and control technology enabling high-speed work on large quantities of lumber. And wood waste can now be a sustainable alternative to the plastic materials typically used in 3D printing. At Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, researchers have developed a method in which sawdust enclosed in an organic epoxy resin can be recycled for additive manufacturing.

Since the beginning of the 13th century, water-powered saw mills were spreading with varying technologies. The challenge was to convert the rotary motion of the water-wheel into the thrusting motion of the saw. Modern industrial saw mills are automated and digital high-tech lines

Obviously, women’s work in a factory in Lancashire, in the UK: cotton fibers are spun into yarn at a cotton mill. In today’s textile factories, you hardly ever see people anymore