Can You Crack It? That Forgotten Dutch Creation Which Forged our Contemporary World
There are numerous candidates to claim the designation as “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
As per a recent publication, however, that honor should go to the automated timber mill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, constructing a simple trading ship necessitated approximately ten sawyers laboring for three months,” writes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same amount of cut lumber could be produced in less than a week.”
Thanks to this speedy mechanical saw, which turned logs into boards using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels faster compared to any other nation, an advantage that sparked a century of Dutch naval, financial and cultural dominance in Europe and the globe.
The Original True Industrial Device
The inventor's sawmill, argues the writer, represented “humanity’s first true industrial apparatus.” A windmill rotated a wheel. One component converted the rotary movement into vertical action to power the saw. Another component changed the rotary motion into a lateral motion feeding the timber toward the blade. A ratchet system shifted the wood ahead one precise increment each cycle.
“Each element was simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to integrate these parts so the machine acted within a precisely synchronized order, sawing on every descending motion while moving on every upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of fundamental components.”
A fact that brings us up to the current puzzle. I’d like you to reinvent one of the basic ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s invention.
Round and Up
Design a machine which converts rotary motion to up-and-down action. You have these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve through which a single the bars will fit perfectly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a stand, so the parts don’t collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK time with the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (less celebrated) candidates as the world’s greatest invention.
