Are You Able to Crack It? The Overlooked Dutch Invention Which Shaped our Modern World
One can find many candidates for the title of “planet’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that title should go to a automated timber mill invented by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, constructing a modest merchant vessel necessitated around 10 lumberjacks working over three months,” writes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, an identical amount of cut lumber could be manufactured within a week.”
Owing to this rapid automated cutter, which converted logs into boards with virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could build vessels faster than anyone else, which sparked a century of Netherlands naval, economic as well as artistic dominance in Europe and the world.
The Original True Industrial Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s first authentic industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a wheel. A single part transformed its rotary movement into up-and-down action for the saw. Another component changed the rotary motion into a sideway’s motion feeding the log toward the blade. A geared mechanism moved the log ahead a measured step per stroke.
“Every component was modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts in order that the machine operated within a perfectly controlled order, sawing with each descending motion while advancing with each upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of fundamental parts.”
A fact that brings us up to the current puzzle. I’d like for you to reinvent a key the fundamental ideas underpinning this historic machine.
Round and Up
Construct a machine that turns circular movement to vertical motion. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve into which a single the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a stand, so the parts don’t collapse.)
The solution returns later today UK time with the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please propose (less celebrated) contenders for the world’s greatest creation.
