Can You Crack This? That Forgotten Dutch Creation Which Shaped our Contemporary World
There are many candidates for the designation as “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
As per a new book, though, that title belongs to the mechanised sawmill invented by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before mechanised sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required approximately ten lumberjacks working for three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered sawmills, the same quantity of cut lumber might be produced within seven days.”
Owing to this rapid mechanical saw, which turned logs into boards using almost no manual labor, the Dutch could construct ships more quickly than anyone else, which unleashed one hundred years of Netherlands naval, economic and artistic supremacy across the continent and the world.
The Original True Manufacturing Device
The inventor's lumber mill, argues the writer, was “humanity’s initial true industrial machine.” A windmill turned a wheel. A single part transformed the circular motion into up-and-down motion to power the cutting blade. Another component transformed the spinning movement into a sideway’s movement advancing the log toward the cutter. A ratchet system moved the wood ahead a measured step each cycle.
“Every component seemed simple on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to combine these parts so they acted within a precisely synchronized order, sawing on every descending stroke while advancing with each return stroke. It was an astonishingly clever use of basic parts.”
Which leads us to the current challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the fundamental ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a machine which converts circular motion into up-and-down action. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a cylinder or housing through which one of the bars can slide snugly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a stand, so that the parts don’t collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK featuring the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please propose (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s greatest invention.
