In the 2025 musical film Ann Lee’s willA radical 18th-century prophetess who claims to speak with God leads her followers from England to the United States. Surprisingly, this story is based on the true story.

Even more surprising is that “Mother Ann’s” loyal followers would go on to invent gadgets you can have in your home right now, from mail-order seed packets to the circular saw. And, like the first leader of their faith, one of the most famous inventors was a woman.

Who were the Shakers?

A branch of the English Quakers, the Shakers or Shaking Quakers called themselves the United Society of Believers in the Second Appearing of Christ. (Their nicknames come from their practice of ecstatically “shaking” during worship.) The agitators dedicated themselves to a peaceful and simple life that included strict celibacy and productive work. At the group’s peak in 1840, there were about 6,000 members, primarily in the northeastern United States.

Often persecuted and misunderstood, the Shakers sought refuge in isolation. They established egalitarian communes where property and labor were shared, supporting themselves through agriculture and the sale of homemade products.

Although men and women lived separately in Shaker communities, they enjoyed equal status. Shaker “Brothers” and “Sisters” were expected to collaborate for the benefit of all. For example, while the brothers split the wood into strips, the sisters wove the strips into baskets for sale.

The Shaker passion for inventing

The Shaker faith encouraged its followers to work hard and strive for perfection. This emphasis on industriousness and efficiency inspired many Shakers to become inventors, in areas ranging from medicine to furniture design.

Shakers are especially known for their contributions to agricultural technology. These include devices for processing various crops, a tool called a power harrow for tilling fields, and a maximum-efficiency round design for barns. The agitators were also the first to sell seeds by mail in paper packets, just as they are sold today. Even clothespins are said to be a Shaker invention.

Since both innovation and equality were central to the Shaker lifestyle, it is not surprising that some Shaker women became inventors. This includes Sarah “Tabitha” Babbitt (1779–1853), one of the first known female inventors in American history.

Babbitt and his parents entered the Shaker community in Harvard, Massachusetts, as converts when Babbitt was 13 years old. “Sister Tabitha” would remain in this community for the rest of her life.

Babbitt is credited with several improvements to existing mechanical processes, such as a method of constructing and fitting dentures. It is probably because of his fame that the origin of “Babbitt metal”, a soft alloy still used to support loads in heavy machinery, is often said to be Shaker. (The metal was actually named after Isaac Babbitt, who was also from Massachusetts, but was not a Shaker nor related to Tabitha.)

Babbitt and the circular saw

The most important invention attributed to Babbitt is the circular saw, predecessor of the electric circular saw, which he is said to have developed around 1813.

Before the introduction of circular saws, Shaker lumberjacks cut large logs into lumber using a two-man saw or pit saw. Each man held one end of a long saw blade, one of them at the bottom of a hole in the ground (the saw hole) and the other at the top of the hole. The two men raised the saw up and down to cut through a piece of wood placed between them.

Sawing with a hole saw requires less force than cutting side to side on level ground because the hole saw is pulled by gravity on the downward stroke. It was an improvement over previous methods, but inventors like Babbitt thought about how to make the process even more efficient.

Like other Shaker Sisters, Babbitt would have been an experienced spinner (in fact, she is also said to have invented an improved spinning wheel head). According to Harvard Shaker community records, Babbitt cut his original prototype saw blade from tin and attached it to the spindle of a spinning wheel. The blade, attached to a pulley mechanism, rotated when operated by a pedal beneath the machine, similar to how the spinning wheel worked. The wood could then be cut by pushing it against the rotating blade, requiring even less effort on the part of the operator. Depending on the size of the saw, the device could also be operated by a single person.

Shaker Brothers later manufactured steel blades to Babbitt’s design. The device was so successful that it quickly spread to other Shaker communities, as well as non-Shakers. In the 1820s, many Shaker sawmills were equipped with circular saws, and by 1839 the largest Shaker community sawmill in Mount Lebanon, New York, had six of them.

Tracking Shaker’s Inventions

The Shakers’ belief in communal property prevented inventors from seeking patents and made them happy to share their designs with others. This means that tracing Shaker inventions is a challenge for historians, and Shaker inventors often do not receive credit by name.

In 2005, inventor Sam Asano criticized the criteria for induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, using Babbitt and Benjamin Franklin as examples of historically important inventors who never filed patents.

Even if Babbitt invented the circular saw, it does not appear to have been the only one, or even the first. In England, Samuel Miller obtained a patent for a circular saw in 1777, two years before Tabitha Babbitt was born. It is unlikely that Miller’s sentence would have been extended to the Shakers, who had followed Mother Ann to the American colonies in 1774.

According to Robert Meader, director of a 20th-century Shaker history museum, the circular saw was used as early as the 17th century in the Netherlands (present-day Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), “but the trade guilds wouldn’t let it leave the country.”

Later, Meader explained, Babbitt and others independently “reinvented” the device several more times. Later inventors would design new forms of circular saws, such as those powered by a crank instead of a pedal.

in the book Inspired Innovations: A Celebration of Shaker IngenuityEditor Stephen Miller notes that different people were credited with the invention of the circular saw, including among the Shakers. Whoever created the device first, the Shakers “seem to have been among its earliest users and may have created new forms and uses for it,” Miller wrote.

The decline of the Shakers

Despite their love of new technologies, it was the rise of industrialization in the 1870s that marked the end of the Shakers. Cheap, mass-produced industrial products proved stiff competition for the slower, more expensive work of Shaker artisans. Many Shaker communities were forced to close as brothers and sisters left the faith to seek conventional jobs.

It didn’t help that new American adoption and child welfare laws also made it much more difficult for communal religious societies like the Shakers to adopt children. The celibate Shakers had once increased their numbers by adopting orphans, but now they could only grow through conversion: just when their way of life was becoming unsustainable. Since more people left the Shakers than joined, their numbers decreased.

Today, the Shakers live on through the things they created, from their music to their sleek, minimalist furniture to the numerous inventions Tabitha Babbitt and her brothers and sisters designed.

However, the Shakers are not entirely extinct, and their simple life and hard work still attract some. The last active Shaker community, located in Maine, has three members as of 2026, one of whom joined last year. What could they invent next?

In The history of everythingPopular Science uncovers the hidden stories and surprising origins behind everyday things.

2025 PopSci Best of what’s new

The 50 most important innovations of the year