Are You Able to Solve This? That Forgotten Netherlands Invention That Shaped the Contemporary Globe
There are many candidates to claim the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, though, that honor should go to the automated sawmill invented through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before mechanised cutting, constructing a simple trading ship required approximately 10 lumberjacks working over 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-powered sawmills, an identical quantity of processed timber might be manufactured in less than seven days.”
Thanks to their speedy mechanical saw, which converted timber to boards using virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships faster than any other nation, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Dutch maritime, financial as well as cultural dominance across Europe and the globe.
The First True Industrial Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, represented “mankind’s initial true industrial machine.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part transformed the rotary movement to up-and-down motion for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed the spinning motion into a sideway’s movement advancing the log to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the log ahead a measured step per stroke.
“Each element was simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to integrate these parts so the machine acted in a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting with each descending motion and moving with each upward stroke. It was an astonishingly clever use of fundamental components.”
Which leads us up to the current challenge. The task is for you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Round and Up
Construct a mechanism that turns circular motion into up-and-down motion. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve into which one of the rods can slide snugly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a stand, so that the components do not collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK with the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please propose (non obvious) contenders as the world’s greatest invention.
