Are You Able to Solve It? The Forgotten Dutch Creation That Forged our Contemporary Globe
There are many candidates for the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The combustion motor.
As per a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to a automated timber mill conceived through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, building a simple trading ship required around ten lumberjacks working over three months,” writes the author. “With wind-powered sawmills, the same quantity of processed timber might be manufactured in less than seven days.”
Owing to this rapid mechanical saw, which turned logs to boards using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch were able to construct vessels faster compared to anyone else, which sparked a century of Dutch naval, economic and cultural dominance across Europe and the world.
The Original Genuine Industrial Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, contends the writer, represented “humanity’s first authentic factory machine.” A wind turbine rotated a wheel. A single part transformed its rotary motion to up-and-down action to power the cutting blade. Another component changed the spinning movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood ahead one precise increment each stroke.
“Every component seemed simple on its own. The Dutchman’s genius was to integrate these parts so the machine acted within a perfectly controlled order, cutting on every descending stroke while advancing on every return stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of basic components.”
A fact that leads us up to the current challenge. I’d like for you to reinvent one of the basic concepts underpinning this historic invention.
Round and Up
Design a mechanism which converts rotary motion into up-and-down action. You have these components only: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or housing through which one of the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that you can mount components on a stand, so that the components do not fall down.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK with the solution.
In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to propose (less celebrated) candidates as the planet’s most impactful invention.
