Are You Able to Crack This? That Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged the Contemporary World
One can find many contenders for the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
According to a new book, though, that honor should go to the mechanised sawmill conceived through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to automated sawing, building a modest trading ship necessitated around ten sawyers laboring over 90 days,” notes the author. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of processed timber could be produced in less than a week.”
Thanks to this rapid automated cutter, that turned logs to boards using almost no manual labor, Dutch builders could build vessels more quickly compared to anyone else, an advantage that unleashed a century of Dutch naval, financial and cultural supremacy across Europe and the globe.
The First Genuine Industrial Device
The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, represented “humanity’s first true factory apparatus.” A windmill turned a gear. One component transformed the rotary motion into vertical action to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed the spinning movement into a sideway’s motion advancing the log to the blade. A ratchet system moved the wood forward a measured step each cycle.
“Each element was simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to combine these parts in order that the machine acted in a precisely synchronized order, cutting on every descending stroke while moving with each return motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of fundamental components.”
Which brings us up to the current challenge. I’d like for you to reimagine one of the basic concepts underpinning this historic machine.
Round and Up
Design a machine that turns rotary motion to up-and-down motion. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a tube or housing through which a single the rods can slide snugly. (Assume it is possible to mount components on a base, so the components do not collapse.)
I’ll be back later today UK featuring the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (non obvious) candidates as the world’s greatest invention.
