Are You Able to Crack This? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged our Contemporary Globe
One can find many candidates to claim the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The combustion motor.
As per a new book, though, that title should go to a automated sawmill invented through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Prior to automated sawing, constructing a simple trading ship necessitated around 10 sawyers working over three months,” writes the author. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, an identical quantity of processed timber could be produced within seven days.”
Owing to their speedy automated saw, that converted timber into planks using almost no manual labor, the Dutch could build ships faster than anyone else, which sparked a century of Dutch naval, financial and artistic dominance in Europe and the globe.
The First True Industrial Machine
The inventor's sawmill, argues Dávila, was “mankind’s initial authentic factory apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a gear. One component converted the rotary motion to up-and-down motion to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed the rotary movement into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber toward the cutter. A geared mechanism moved the wood forward a measured step each stroke.
“Every component seemed modest on its own. The Dutchman’s genius lay in how to combine them so they operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each downward motion and advancing with each return stroke. This constituted a remarkably intelligent use of basic parts.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s puzzle. The task is for you to reimagine one of the basic concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s invention.
Round and Up
Construct a mechanism which converts rotary motion to up-and-down action. You have these items only: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a cylinder or housing into which a single the bars will fit snugly. (Assume you can put things on a stand, so the parts don’t collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK featuring the answer.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s most impactful creation.
