Can You Solve It? The Overlooked Netherlands Creation That Forged our Modern World
One can find many candidates for the designation as “world’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a new book, however, that honor should go to a mechanised sawmill conceived through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, building a modest merchant vessel required approximately 10 sawyers laboring for 90 days,” notes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of cut lumber might be manufactured in less than seven days.”
Owing to this speedy automated saw, that converted timber into planks with almost no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to build vessels faster compared to anyone else, which unleashed one hundred years of Dutch maritime, financial and artistic dominance across Europe and the globe.
The Original True Industrial Device
The inventor's sawmill, contends Dávila, was “mankind’s first true factory apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a gear. A single part converted the circular motion to up-and-down motion for the cutting blade. Another component changed that same spinning motion into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber toward the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the log forward one precise increment each cycle.
“Every component seemed simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to combine them so they acted in a precisely synchronized order, sawing with each downward stroke and advancing with each return motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent use of basic parts.”
A fact that brings us to the current puzzle. I’d like you to reinvent a key the fundamental concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine which converts circular motion into vertical motion. You have these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or housing into which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Assume it is possible to mount components on a stand, so that the parts do not collapse.)
I’ll be back later today UK time featuring the answer.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to propose (less celebrated) candidates for the world’s most impactful creation.
