Can You Solve This? That Overlooked Dutch Creation Which Forged our Contemporary World
There are many candidates to claim the designation as “world’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that title belongs to the automated timber mill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Before automated sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required approximately ten lumberjacks working over 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, an identical amount of cut lumber might be manufactured within seven days.”
Thanks to their speedy automated saw, which turned logs to planks with virtually no human effort, the Dutch were able to construct ships faster compared to any other nation, which unleashed one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, economic and cultural dominance across Europe and the globe.
The First Genuine Industrial Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, contends Dávila, was “mankind’s first true industrial machine.” A windmill turned a wheel. A single part converted its circular movement to up-and-down action to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed that same spinning movement into a lateral motion feeding the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism moved the wood ahead a measured step per stroke.
“Each element was simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine them in order that the machine operated in a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing on every downward stroke while advancing on every upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent use of basic parts.”
Which leads us to the current challenge. The task is for you to reinvent a key the fundamental concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine that turns circular motion into up-and-down motion. Your available these items only: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, which is a cylinder or sleeve into which one of the bars can slide snugly. (Assume it is possible to mount components on a base, so the parts do not fall down.)
I’ll be back later today UK time with the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) candidates for the world’s greatest invention.
