Can You Crack It? That Overlooked Dutch Invention That Forged the Modern World
There are numerous contenders for the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, though, that honor belongs to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Prior to automated sawing, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated around ten sawyers laboring for 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical amount of processed timber might be produced in less than a week.”
Owing to this rapid automated cutter, that converted logs to planks using almost no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to build ships faster than anyone else, an advantage that unleashed a century of Dutch maritime, financial as well as artistic dominance across the continent and the world.
The First True Manufacturing Device
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues the writer, represented “humanity’s initial true industrial apparatus.” A windmill turned a gear. A single part converted its rotary motion into vertical action to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed that same spinning motion into a sideway’s motion feeding the timber toward the blade. A ratchet system moved the wood forward one precise increment each cycle.
“Each element seemed modest on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to combine them in order that they operated within a perfectly controlled order, cutting on every descending motion while advancing with each return stroke. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent application of fundamental components.”
Which leads us up to the current puzzle. The task is you to reinvent one of the fundamental ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Round and Up
Design a machine which converts circular motion to vertical motion. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a cylinder or housing through which a single the rods can slide snugly. (Consider that you can put things on a base, so the components do not fall down.)
I’ll be back later today UK time with the answer.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please propose (non obvious) contenders as the planet’s most impactful creation.
