New technologies in lumber production bolstered new lumber competitors, namely the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company in Williams, AZ, and the Flagstaff Lumber Manufacturing Company. Offering faster and more efficient ways to produce the most amount of lumber within the shortest amount of time, innovation allowed these new competitors to catch up with the AL&T Company. T.A. Riordan kept track of these new technologies through his subscription to the publication American Lumberman, and he kept a personal record of advertisements for new sawmill and logging machinery on the American market. Whether he intended to purchase new machinery for the AL&T Company or compare new inventions with machinery that was already in use at his sawmill, T.A. Riordan stayed informed to ensure that the AL&T Company remained the top competitor in northern Arizona lumbering.

Among the most important innovations for the northern Arizona lumber industry were drying kilns—a heated structure to store and dry processed lumber before shipping the products to market. This technology cut the time needed to cure lumber from four months down to one week, expediting the process of supplying the market with lumber products. The Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company made use of such technology during the 1890s, allowing them to catch up with their greatest competitor, the AL&T Company.

Lumbermen throughout the world began fixing motors to their crosscut saws to reduce the time spent “bucking” or cutting fallen timber down to the appropriate shipping size. These motorized saws conserved loggers’ energy as they no longer needed to push and pull crosscut saws through the timber manually. The invention of motorized saws eventually led to the creation of the first handheld, motorized timber-cutting chainsaws during the 1920s. German engineer, Andreas Stihl, who patented the first electric chainsaw, referred to them as “tree-felling machines.”