Can You Solve It? The Forgotten Dutch Invention That Forged our Contemporary Globe
One can find many candidates for the designation as “world’s greatest innovation.” The circular axle. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to a automated sawmill conceived through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before automated cutting, building a simple merchant vessel required around 10 sawyers laboring over 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of cut lumber could be produced in less than a week.”
Thanks to their speedy automated cutter, that converted timber to boards using almost no manual labor, the Dutch could construct ships faster than anyone else, an advantage that sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, economic and cultural supremacy across the continent and the globe.
The Original True Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, contends Dávila, represented “mankind’s first authentic industrial machine.” A wind turbine turned a wheel. One component converted its circular motion into up-and-down action for the cutting blade. Another component changed that same spinning motion into a lateral movement feeding the timber to the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the log ahead one precise increment per cycle.
“Every component seemed modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to combine them in order that the machine operated within a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting with each downward motion and moving with each upward stroke. It was a remarkably clever use of fundamental components.”
Which leads us up to the current puzzle. I’d like you to reimagine a key the basic ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s invention.
Circular to Vertical
Design a machine which converts rotary movement into up-and-down action. Your available these components only: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a tube or sleeve through which one of the bars can slide snugly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so the components do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK featuring the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please suggest (less celebrated) contenders for the world’s greatest invention.
