Can You Solve It? The Forgotten Dutch Creation That Shaped our Modern Globe
One can find numerous contenders for the designation as “world’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, though, that title should go to a mechanised timber mill conceived through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Prior to automated sawing, building a modest trading ship necessitated approximately 10 lumberjacks laboring for three months,” writes the author. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical quantity of processed timber could be manufactured in less than seven days.”
Thanks to their rapid mechanical saw, which turned logs to boards with almost no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels faster than anyone else, an advantage that sparked one hundred years of Dutch naval, economic as well as artistic dominance in the continent and the world.
The Original Genuine Industrial Device
Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a wheel. A single part converted the circular movement to up-and-down motion to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed the spinning movement into a lateral motion feeding the log to the cutter. A ratchet system moved the log ahead one precise increment each cycle.
“Every component seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to combine these parts in order that the machine acted within a precisely synchronized order, sawing with each descending motion and moving with each return motion. It was a remarkably clever application of basic parts.”
A fact that leads us to today’s challenge. I’d like for you to reinvent one of the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Circular to Vertical
Design a machine that turns circular movement into vertical motion. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a tube or housing into which a single the bars can slide snugly. (Consider that you can mount components on a stand, so the components do not fall down.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (non obvious) candidates for the world’s greatest invention.
