Are You Able to Crack This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Shaped our Contemporary World
One can find numerous contenders for the designation as “planet’s greatest innovation.” The circular axle. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a new book, though, that honor should go to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Prior to automated cutting, constructing a modest merchant vessel required approximately ten sawyers working for 90 days,” writes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, an identical amount of processed timber could be produced within seven days.”
Thanks to their rapid mechanical saw, that converted logs into boards using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could construct vessels more quickly than anyone else, which unleashed one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, economic and cultural dominance in Europe and the globe.
The First True Industrial Device
Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, argues the writer, represented “mankind’s first authentic industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a wheel. A single part transformed the circular motion to up-and-down motion for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed that same rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the log to the cutter. A ratchet system moved the wood ahead a measured step per cycle.
“Every component was simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so they acted within a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting with each downward motion and moving on every 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 a key the fundamental ideas behind this historic invention.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a mechanism that turns rotary movement to up-and-down motion. You have these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a cylinder or sleeve into which a single the rods will fit snugly. (Consider that it is possible to mount components on a base, so that the components do not collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK time featuring the answer.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) candidates for the planet’s greatest invention.
