Are You Able to Crack This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Shaped our Modern World
There are numerous candidates to claim the title of “planet’s greatest innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The combustion motor.
As per a recent publication, however, that title should go to a automated sawmill conceived through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Prior to automated cutting, constructing a modest merchant vessel necessitated approximately ten lumberjacks laboring over three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical amount of processed timber could be manufactured in less than a week.”
Thanks to their rapid automated saw, that converted timber to planks with virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could construct vessels more quickly compared to anyone else, which unleashed a century of Netherlands maritime, economic as well as artistic dominance across Europe and the globe.
The Original Genuine Industrial Device
The inventor's lumber mill, argues the writer, represented “humanity’s first authentic industrial machine.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part converted its rotary movement into up-and-down motion for the saw. A separate mechanism changed the rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood forward one precise increment each cycle.
“Every component seemed simple on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine them so the machine operated in a perfectly controlled sequence, sawing on every descending motion and moving on every upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent application of fundamental components.”
A fact that brings us to today’s puzzle. I’d like for you to reinvent one of the basic concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Round and Up
Construct a mechanism which converts circular movement into vertical motion. Your available these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a cylinder or sleeve through which one of the bars will fit perfectly. (Consider that you can mount components on a base, so that the components do not collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK with the answer.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) candidates as the world’s most impactful invention.
