It all started in 1921 when inventor Edmond Michel was standing in a sugar cane field in Louisiana, America. There, he saw the workers using machetes to hack their way by hand through the thick, tough sugar cane. It was a heavy, back breaking task. Seeing this, Michel thought there had to be an easier way. And that thought later led to the start of the Skil Corporation.
Later, in his workshop in New Orleans, he developed a mechanized machete. But to make the idea work, he saw that the blade somehow had to rotate. He soon started to improve on his first idea, and in 1923 he had developed the world’s first electric hand saw. A New Orleans newspaper covered his invention in a short feature article.
Joseph W. Sullivan, a farmland developer, read the article while he was traveling from Minneapolis to Florida. He thought it looked like a great idea, and went straight to New Orleans to track down Edmond Michel.
After further improvements of the electric handsaw, ‘The Michel Electric Handsaw Company’ was started in 1924 by Edmond Michel and Joseph W. Sullivan. They called their revolutionary saw the ‘Skilsaw’.
