Are You Able to Crack This? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention Which Forged the Contemporary World
There are numerous candidates to claim the title of “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
As per a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to a mechanised sawmill invented through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before automated cutting, constructing a simple merchant vessel necessitated around 10 sawyers laboring over 90 days,” writes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical quantity of processed timber might be produced in less than a week.”
Owing to their rapid automated saw, which turned timber to boards using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels more quickly than any other nation, an advantage that sparked one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, financial and cultural dominance in the continent and the globe.
The First Genuine Industrial Device
The inventor's lumber mill, argues the writer, represented “humanity’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. One component converted the rotary movement to up-and-down motion to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed the rotary motion into a sideway’s motion feeding the timber toward the blade. A geared mechanism moved the log forward a measured step each stroke.
“Every component was modest by itself. The Dutchman’s genius was to combine these parts so the machine operated within a perfectly controlled order, sawing on every descending motion and advancing on every upward stroke. It was a remarkably intelligent use of fundamental parts.”
A fact that leads us to today’s challenge. The task is for you to reimagine a key the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Round and Up
Design a mechanism which converts rotary motion to vertical action. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a cylinder or sleeve through which one of the rods will fit snugly. (Consider that it is possible to mount components on a stand, so the components do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK featuring the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s greatest invention.
