Can You Solve This? The Overlooked Dutch Invention Which Shaped our Modern Globe
One can find numerous contenders to claim the designation as “world’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
As per a recent publication, though, that honor belongs to the mechanised timber mill invented through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before automated sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required approximately 10 sawyers working for 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, the same amount of processed timber could be manufactured in less than a week.”
Owing to their rapid mechanical cutter, that converted logs into boards with almost no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels more quickly compared to any other nation, which unleashed a century of Dutch naval, financial and artistic supremacy in the continent and the world.
The Original True Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, contends the writer, was “mankind’s initial true factory apparatus.” A windmill rotated a gear. A single part converted its circular movement into vertical motion for the saw. A separate mechanism transformed that same spinning movement into a lateral motion feeding the timber to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the wood ahead one precise increment per stroke.
“Every component seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius was to combine these parts in order that the machine operated within a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing with each descending stroke while moving with each upward motion. It was an astonishingly clever use of fundamental components.”
Which brings us up to today’s challenge. The task is for you to reinvent a key the basic concepts underpinning this historic machine.
Round and Up
Design a machine which converts rotary movement to up-and-down motion. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or housing into which one of the rods will fit perfectly. (Consider that you can put things on a stand, so the parts do not fall down.)
The solution returns later today UK time with the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to propose (non obvious) candidates for the planet’s greatest creation.
