Can You Crack This? That Overlooked Dutch Invention That Shaped our Modern World
There are many candidates to claim the title of “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a new book, though, that title belongs to the mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Before mechanised sawing, building a modest merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 sawyers working over 90 days,” notes the author. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, an identical amount of processed timber could be produced within a week.”
Owing to their rapid mechanical saw, which converted logs to planks with almost no manual labor, Dutch builders could construct vessels faster than any other nation, which sparked a century of Netherlands naval, economic and cultural dominance in Europe and the globe.
The First Genuine Industrial Device
Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends the writer, represented “mankind’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A windmill rotated a wheel. A single part transformed the rotary motion into vertical motion to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed that same spinning movement into a lateral motion feeding the timber toward the blade. A ratchet system shifted the wood forward one precise increment each stroke.
“Every component seemed modest by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to integrate these parts in order that they operated within a precisely synchronized order, sawing with each descending stroke and moving with each return stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of basic components.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s challenge. I’d like you to reinvent a key the basic concepts underpinning this historic machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a machine that turns circular movement to up-and-down action. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or housing through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can put things on a stand, so that the components don’t collapse.)
The solution returns later today UK time featuring the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to propose (less celebrated) candidates as the world’s greatest invention.
