Can You Crack It? The Overlooked Dutch Creation That Shaped the Contemporary World
There are numerous candidates to claim the designation as “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before mechanised sawing, building a simple trading ship required approximately 10 lumberjacks working over 90 days,” writes the author. “Using wind-powered sawmills, an identical quantity of cut lumber might be manufactured in less than seven days.”
Owing to their speedy automated cutter, that turned logs into planks using virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to construct vessels more quickly compared to any other nation, an advantage that unleashed a century of Dutch naval, financial and artistic supremacy across the continent and the globe.
The Original True Industrial Machine
The inventor's sawmill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial true industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a gear. A single part transformed its circular movement to up-and-down motion for the saw. Another component transformed that same rotary motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the log to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the log forward one precise increment per stroke.
“Every component was modest on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine them so the machine operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting on every descending motion and moving with each upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of fundamental parts.”
A fact that brings us up to today’s challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the basic concepts behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine that turns rotary motion into vertical motion. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, which is a cylinder or sleeve through which one of the rods can slide snugly. (Assume you can put things on a stand, so that the parts don’t fall down.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK time with the answer.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates as the planet’s greatest invention.
