Can You Solve It? That Forgotten Dutch Invention Which Forged our Contemporary World
One can find numerous contenders for the designation as “world’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that honor should go to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Prior to mechanised cutting, constructing a simple merchant vessel required approximately 10 sawyers working over three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of processed timber might be produced in less than seven days.”
Owing to their speedy automated cutter, that converted logs into boards with almost no human effort, the Dutch were able to construct ships faster than anyone else, which sparked one hundred years of Dutch naval, economic as well as artistic supremacy across Europe and the world.
The Original Genuine Manufacturing Device
The inventor's sawmill, argues the writer, represented “humanity’s initial true factory apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part converted the circular motion to up-and-down action to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed the rotary motion into a sideway’s movement advancing the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the log forward one precise increment per cycle.
“Every component seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to integrate these parts so the machine operated in a perfectly controlled sequence, sawing on every downward motion and moving on every upward motion. This constituted a remarkably clever use of basic components.”
A fact that brings us up to the current challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the basic ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Round and Up
Construct a mechanism that turns circular movement to up-and-down motion. Your available these components only: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a tube or housing into which one of the rods can slide snugly. (Consider that you can mount components on a stand, so the parts don’t collapse.)
I’ll be back later today UK time with the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to propose (non obvious) candidates as the planet’s greatest invention.
