Are You Able to Crack This? That Overlooked Netherlands Invention Which Shaped our Modern World
There are many contenders for the designation as “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that honor should go to a automated timber mill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Before automated sawing, constructing a modest trading ship required around ten lumberjacks working over three months,” notes the author. “With wind-powered sawmills, the same quantity of processed timber could be manufactured within seven days.”
Thanks to this speedy mechanical saw, that converted logs to boards using almost no human effort, Dutch builders could build ships faster than anyone else, which sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, financial and artistic dominance across the continent and the world.
The First Genuine Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's sawmill, contends Dávila, was “humanity’s first true industrial apparatus.” A windmill rotated a wheel. A single part converted its rotary movement to up-and-down motion to power the saw. Another component changed that same spinning movement into a lateral motion feeding the log toward the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the log ahead one precise increment each stroke.
“Each element seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to combine them in order that the machine acted within a precisely synchronized order, cutting on every downward motion and moving with each upward stroke. It was an astonishingly intelligent use of basic parts.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s puzzle. I’d like you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind this historic invention.
Round and Up
Construct a mechanism which converts rotary movement to up-and-down motion. Your available these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a tube or housing through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can mount components on a base, so that the components do not fall down.)
I’ll be back later today UK time with the answer.
In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates as the world’s greatest creation.
