Can You Solve It? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged our Modern World
There are many contenders for the designation as “world’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
As per a new book, though, that honor belongs to a automated timber mill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, constructing a simple trading ship necessitated around 10 lumberjacks working for three months,” writes the author. “With wind-powered sawmills, the same amount of processed timber could be manufactured in less than a week.”
Owing to their speedy automated saw, which turned timber into boards with almost no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to build vessels more quickly than any other nation, which unleashed one hundred years of Dutch naval, financial as well as cultural supremacy across Europe and the globe.
The Original Genuine Manufacturing Device
The inventor's lumber mill, contends the writer, represented “mankind’s initial authentic industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a gear. One component transformed the circular movement into up-and-down action for the saw. Another component transformed the spinning motion into a sideway’s movement advancing the timber to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the log forward one precise increment each stroke.
“Each element seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius was to combine these parts so they operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each downward motion and moving on every upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent application of fundamental components.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s challenge. The task is you to reinvent one of the basic concepts underpinning this historic machine.
Round and Up
Design a machine which converts circular movement into vertical action. Your available these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a cylinder or housing into which a single the bars can slide snugly. (Assume you can put things on a base, so the parts do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates for the world’s greatest creation.