Can You Solve It? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Shaped our Contemporary World
One can find numerous contenders to claim the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The combustion motor.
According to a new book, though, that honor should go to the mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Prior to automated sawing, building a modest merchant vessel necessitated approximately ten sawyers laboring over three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven lumber mills, the same quantity of cut lumber might be manufactured within a week.”
Owing to this speedy automated cutter, that converted timber to boards using virtually no human effort, the Dutch could build ships more quickly than any other nation, which unleashed one hundred years of Dutch maritime, financial as well as cultural dominance in the continent and the world.
The First True Industrial Machine
Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends Dávila, represented “mankind’s first true factory apparatus.” A windmill turned a gear. One component converted the circular motion into vertical motion to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed that same spinning motion into a sideway’s motion feeding the timber toward the blade. A ratchet system shifted the wood forward one precise increment per stroke.
“Every component seemed simple on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius was to combine these parts so the machine acted in a perfectly controlled order, cutting on every downward stroke and advancing with each return motion. It was an astonishingly clever use of basic parts.”
A fact that brings us up to today’s challenge. The task is you to reinvent one of the fundamental concepts behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a mechanism that turns rotary movement into up-and-down action. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve into which one of the bars can slide snugly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a base, so that the components do not fall down.)
I’ll be back later today UK with the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to propose (less celebrated) candidates for the world’s most impactful invention.
