How Not to Cut Off Your FingerAlumnus Steve Gass’ quest to make table saws safer.

For this experiment to work, I had to become one with the hot dog — to believe in the hot dog as an extension of my own finger, both of us mostly salt and water merging into one salty watery body. I stood before a spinning table saw, holding the frank fast to a piece of plywood. The teeth bit the wood, sharp disc churning closer and closer. Then, with a loud snap, the blade disappeared. The hot dog bore only the tiniest nick.

Humans, like hot dogs, are good electrical conductors. Our electrical charge is why we can think thoughts, and why we risk electrocution if we are caught swimming during a thunderstorm. In 1999, Steve Gass, ’86, considering this fact, had an idea: What if a table saw blade could retract fast enough, upon contact with flesh, to avoid serious injury? He set up a rudimentary prototype consisting of a circuit that would respond to blips in its electrical current and stop the blade within a fraction of a second. He called it SawStop.

Though I don’t consider myself squeamish, I am afraid of saws. And this fear, I have come to learn, is valid: In the U.S., table saw injuries cause more than 30,000 hospital visits each year, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). These fall into four gruesome categories: “lacerations” (cuts), “fractures” (broken bones), “amputations” (digits cut off entirely) and “avulsions” (in which a body part is torn off). Every day, more than 10 people lose fingers to their saws.

The gadget responsible for making a SawStop blade halt as soon as it senses flesh.

Gass has a gnarly scar across the base of one thumb, the product of playing unsupervised in his dad’s workshop when he was 4 years old. “I am someone who by nature perhaps needs SawStop more than almost anybody else,” he said. We sat in a conference room at the company headquarters in Tualatin. “I get stuff done, but I am also, uh, subject to injuries doing it.”

At first, Gass — a lifelong “tinkerer” then working as a patent attorney in Portland — approached the table-saw problem as an interesting physics equation. A first-generation college student, he decided to study physics at Oregon State after reading an entry on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in the Encyclopedia Britannica. (He went on to get a Ph.D. in physics and a law degree.) He wondered: How fast would you need to stop a saw to prevent injury, and where would the force of all that spinning fury go?

In hindsight, good design work turned out to be the easy part. Even finding a willing human test subject — himself — proved easier than the monumental task ahead: He had to sell it. Gass approached table-saw manufacturers. He show-ed executives the same hot-dog demonstration that I participated in — and in meeting after meeting, he was rebuffed.

If you design your product, relying on humans not to make mistakes, you’ve made a mistake in the design of your product.

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Large companies were wary. According to a 2004 report by NPR, they resisted adopting a technology that hadn’t yet been proven at scale, and feared that implementing an emergency brake on some, but not all, saws “would make them vulnerable to lawsuits.” They also seemed to think that, given the difficulty of manufacturing, should they decline to license SawStop, it would simply go away. “Had I known what I know now,” said David Fanning, a law colleague who became one of Gass’ partners in SawStop, “I would’ve said, ‘That’s a good bet.’”

It’s not like Gass had harbored any particular interest in consumer safety. SawStop was the latest in a string of inventions he and Fanning had devised in hopes that they could license their patents “and sit on a beach somewhere and collect royalties,” Fanning said. But once Gass understood the scope of the problem and devised a solution, he started to think in ethical terms. You can sense his frustration even now in the way that he describes risk and liability. “If you design your product relying on humans not to make mistakes, you’ve made a mistake in the design of your product,” he said.

So if major companies weren’t willing to make their saws safer, he would just have to sell his own saws. Being patent attorneys, Gass and Fanning filed patents — dozens of them. They described this as necessary to protect both their invention and, once they decided to strike out on their own, their investors. They figured they would make 100 saws, maybe, and then manufacturers would come around and license the technology.

In 2001, SawStop received the CPSC Chairman’s Commendation for product safety. In 2002, Popular Science named it one of the Best New Innovations of the year. Still, no deals came. But as the business grew, it revealed that table saws could be safer. Nonetheless, manufacturers argued against regulations, saying the technology was too expensive or that the patents stood in their way. Some commenters on Reddit’s woodworking subreddit have compared the saga to the battle over seatbelts in the 1980s.

“It’s kind of a disillusioning education to come up with a technology like this, that has the potential to prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries — devastating, life-changing in some cases — that cost the country billions of dollars a year,” Gass said. “And for a fraction of that, you could prevent all those injuries. Yet the nature of corporations making decisions is such that if corporations don’t have economic responsibility for the injuries, or externalities, created by their products, they won’t change.”

In 2003, Gass and his colleagues petitioned the CPSC to create an industry-wide safety standard. More than 20 years later, it still appears unlikely to pass. However, at a recent CPSC hearing, SawStop cleared the way by announcing that it would relinquish its remaining patent, which was set to expire in 2033. “I felt like that was the right thing to do,” Gass said. As of today, SawStop has received reports from some 10,000 table saw users whose digits have been spared by their technology. The very first time a customer called the company’s landline phone, Gass picked it up himself. “We had an accident on your saw today,” the customer told him. A long pause. “It worked.”