Can You Crack This? That Overlooked Netherlands Creation Which Shaped our Modern Globe
There are numerous contenders for the title of “world’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
As per a recent publication, however, that title belongs to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 lumberjacks working for three months,” notes the author. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, the same amount of processed timber might be manufactured in less than a week.”
Owing to this speedy automated cutter, that turned logs into planks using almost no manual labor, the Dutch could build ships more quickly than anyone else, an advantage that sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, economic as well as artistic dominance in the continent and the world.
The Original True Industrial Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial authentic factory apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a wheel. A single part transformed the circular motion into up-and-down motion for the saw. Another component transformed that same spinning movement into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber toward the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood forward one precise increment per stroke.
“Each element was simple on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to integrate them so the machine acted within a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting with each descending stroke and moving with each return motion. It was an astonishingly clever use of fundamental parts.”
Which leads us to today’s puzzle. The task is you to reimagine one of the basic concepts behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Round and Up
Design a mechanism which converts rotary motion to vertical action. Your available these items only: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or housing through which one of the bars will fit perfectly. (Assume you can put things on a base, so that the components do not collapse.)
The solution returns later today UK time featuring the answer.
In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s most impactful invention.
