Can You Crack This? The Forgotten Dutch Invention That Shaped our Contemporary Globe
One can find numerous candidates to claim the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that honor should go to a mechanised timber mill conceived by Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before automated sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required around 10 sawyers laboring over three months,” writes the author. “Using wind-driven sawmills, an identical amount of cut lumber might be produced within seven days.”
Thanks to this rapid automated cutter, which converted logs into boards with almost no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels faster compared to anyone else, an advantage that sparked a century of Dutch maritime, financial as well as artistic dominance in Europe and the globe.
The First True Manufacturing Device
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, contends Dávila, represented “mankind’s initial authentic factory apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a wheel. A single part converted its circular movement into vertical motion to power the saw. Another component transformed that same spinning motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the timber toward the blade. A ratchet system shifted the log ahead one precise increment each cycle.
“Each element was simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius was to integrate these parts so the machine acted in a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing on every downward motion while moving on every return stroke. It was an astonishingly clever use of basic parts.”
Which leads us to today’s challenge. The task is you to reimagine one of the fundamental concepts behind this historic invention.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine which converts rotary motion to up-and-down action. Your available these items only: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or housing into which one of the bars can slide snugly. (Assume it is possible to mount components on a base, so the components do not fall down.)
I’ll be back later today UK featuring the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates for the world’s greatest invention.
