Can You Crack It? That Forgotten Dutch Creation Which Shaped our Modern Globe
There are many candidates for the title of “planet’s greatest innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that title belongs to the automated sawmill conceived through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Prior to automated cutting, building a modest merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 lumberjacks working over 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical quantity of cut lumber could be produced within seven days.”
Owing to this speedy mechanical saw, that turned timber into boards using virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships more quickly than anyone else, an advantage that sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, financial as well as cultural supremacy across the continent and the world.
The First True Industrial Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s first true factory machine.” A windmill turned a wheel. One component converted its rotary motion into vertical motion to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed the spinning motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism moved the wood ahead one precise increment per cycle.
“Each element seemed simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts in order that they operated within a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting on every downward motion and moving with each upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent use of fundamental parts.”
A fact that leads us to the current puzzle. The task is you to reimagine one of the fundamental ideas behind this historic invention.
Round and Up
Design a machine which converts circular movement to vertical motion. Your available these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve through which one of the bars can slide snugly. (Assume you can put things on a stand, so the parts do not fall down.)
The solution returns later today UK with the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to propose (less celebrated) candidates for the planet’s greatest invention.
