Can You Solve This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Forged our Contemporary World
One can find numerous candidates to claim the designation as “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
According to a new book, however, that title belongs to a automated timber mill invented through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised cutting, building a simple trading ship required approximately ten lumberjacks laboring over three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, an identical quantity of processed timber might be produced in less than seven days.”
Owing to their speedy automated saw, that turned logs into boards using almost no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to build vessels faster compared to anyone else, an advantage that sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, economic and cultural supremacy across the continent and the world.
The Original Genuine Industrial Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, contends Dávila, was “mankind’s first authentic factory apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part converted its rotary movement into vertical motion to power the saw. Another component transformed the rotary motion into a sideway’s movement advancing the log to the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the wood forward a measured step per stroke.
“Each element seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so the machine operated in a perfectly controlled sequence, sawing with each descending motion and advancing on every upward stroke. It was an astonishingly intelligent use of fundamental parts.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent a key the basic concepts behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Round and Up
Design a machine which converts rotary movement to vertical action. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve through which a single the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that you can put things on a base, so that the components do not fall down.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK time with the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) contenders for the planet’s greatest invention.
