Can You Solve This? The Forgotten Dutch Invention Which Shaped the Contemporary Globe
One can find many candidates for the designation as “planet’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
As per a recent publication, though, that honor belongs to a mechanised sawmill invented through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before automated cutting, building a modest merchant vessel necessitated around 10 lumberjacks working for three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-driven sawmills, the same quantity of processed timber might be produced in less than a week.”
Thanks to their rapid mechanical cutter, that turned timber into planks using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch were able to construct vessels more quickly than anyone else, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Dutch naval, financial as well as artistic supremacy in the continent and the world.
The First Genuine Industrial Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component transformed its circular movement into vertical motion to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed the spinning movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the timber to the blade. A geared mechanism moved the log ahead one precise increment per stroke.
“Each element seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to integrate these parts so they operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting on every descending motion and advancing on every return stroke. It was an astonishingly intelligent use of fundamental components.”
Which leads us to the current puzzle. I’d like for you to reinvent a key the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s machine.
Round and Up
Construct a machine that turns circular movement to vertical action. You have these items only: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a cylinder or housing into which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a stand, so the parts don’t fall down.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK time with the solution.
In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Rather, please suggest (non obvious) candidates for the planet’s greatest invention.
