Can You Solve It? The Overlooked Netherlands Creation Which Shaped our Contemporary World
One can find many contenders for the designation as “planet’s greatest innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The combustion motor.
According to a recent publication, though, that honor should go to a mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required around ten lumberjacks laboring over three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-powered sawmills, an identical amount of cut lumber might be produced within seven days.”
Owing to this rapid automated saw, that converted timber to planks with almost no human effort, Dutch builders were able to build ships more quickly compared to any other nation, an advantage that sparked one hundred years of Dutch maritime, economic and cultural dominance across the continent and the world.
The Original Genuine Industrial Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s first true factory apparatus.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component converted the rotary motion into up-and-down action for the saw. Another component transformed that same spinning motion into a lateral movement feeding the timber to the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the log ahead one precise increment per cycle.
“Each element seemed modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to combine them in order that they operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each downward stroke and advancing with each upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of fundamental components.”
A fact that brings us to the current puzzle. The task is you to reinvent one of the fundamental ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a mechanism that turns rotary motion to up-and-down motion. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or housing through which a single the rods can slide perfectly. (Assume you can put things on a base, so the parts don’t fall down.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please propose (less celebrated) contenders for the planet’s greatest invention.
