Are You Able to Crack This? That Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged the Contemporary Globe
One can find many candidates for the designation as “world’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, though, that honor should go to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Prior to automated cutting, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 sawyers working over three months,” notes the author. “With wind-powered sawmills, the same amount of processed timber could be manufactured within a week.”
Owing to this speedy automated cutter, that converted timber to boards using almost no human effort, Dutch builders were able to build ships faster than anyone else, which sparked a century of Dutch naval, economic as well as cultural dominance across Europe and the globe.
The First True Manufacturing Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues Dávila, was “mankind’s initial authentic industrial machine.” A windmill turned a gear. One component transformed the circular motion to up-and-down action for the saw. A separate mechanism transformed the rotary movement into a sideway’s movement feeding the log to the blade. A geared mechanism moved the wood forward a measured step each cycle.
“Every component seemed modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so the machine acted within a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing on every descending stroke and advancing with each upward stroke. This constituted a remarkably clever use of basic components.”
Which leads us up to the current puzzle. I’d like for you to reimagine one of the basic concepts underpinning this historic machine.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine which converts rotary movement to vertical motion. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a tube or sleeve through which one of the rods will fit snugly. (Assume you can put things on a base, so the components do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please propose (non obvious) contenders as the world’s most impactful invention.
