Can You Solve It? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Shaped our Contemporary Globe
One can find many contenders for the title of “world’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
As per a new book, however, that title should go to a automated timber mill invented by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before mechanised cutting, building a modest trading ship required approximately 10 lumberjacks working over three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical quantity of processed timber might be manufactured in less than a week.”
Owing to their speedy automated saw, that turned timber to boards with almost no human effort, the Dutch were able to build ships more quickly than any other nation, which unleashed a century of Netherlands naval, financial and artistic supremacy in the continent and the world.
The Original True Manufacturing Machine
Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends Dávila, represented “mankind’s initial true industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component converted the rotary motion into up-and-down action to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed the rotary motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the timber toward the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the wood ahead a measured step per cycle.
“Every component was modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to integrate these parts in order that the machine acted within a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting on every descending motion and moving with each upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent use of basic components.”
Which brings us up to today’s challenge. The task is you to reimagine one of the fundamental ideas behind this historic machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a mechanism that turns circular movement into vertical action. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or sleeve through which a single the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that you can put things on a stand, so the parts don’t fall down.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK time with the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to propose (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s greatest creation.
