Are You Able to Solve This? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged the Contemporary Globe
One can find numerous candidates for the title of “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, though, that honor should go to a mechanised timber mill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before mechanised sawing, constructing a simple merchant vessel required around 10 lumberjacks laboring for 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of cut lumber could be manufactured in less than a week.”
Owing to this speedy automated cutter, that converted logs to planks with virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could build ships more quickly than any other nation, which sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, economic and artistic supremacy in Europe and the globe.
The Original Genuine Manufacturing Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial true industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a wheel. One component transformed the rotary motion to up-and-down action for the cutting blade. Another component changed the spinning motion into a sideway’s motion advancing the log to the blade. A ratchet system moved the wood ahead a measured step each stroke.
“Each element was modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to integrate them so they acted in a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting with each descending motion and moving on every return motion. It was an astonishingly clever use of fundamental components.”
Which brings us up to today’s challenge. The task is you to reimagine a key the basic concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s invention.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a mechanism which converts circular movement into up-and-down action. You have these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or housing into which one of the rods will fit perfectly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a stand, so that the components don’t collapse.)
I’ll be back later today UK featuring the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to propose (less celebrated) contenders as the planet’s most impactful invention.
