Are You Able to Crack It? That Overlooked Netherlands Invention Which Forged the Contemporary Globe
There are numerous candidates for the designation as “planet’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
As per a new book, though, that title should go to a automated timber mill invented by Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before automated cutting, constructing a simple trading ship required around ten sawyers laboring for 90 days,” writes the author. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, an identical quantity of processed timber could be produced in less than a week.”
Thanks to their speedy mechanical cutter, which turned logs to planks using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could build ships faster compared to any other nation, which sparked one hundred years of Netherlands naval, financial as well as artistic supremacy in Europe and the world.
The First Genuine Industrial Device
Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial true factory apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part transformed its rotary motion to up-and-down action for the cutting blade. Another component changed the spinning movement into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber to the cutter. A geared mechanism moved the log forward one precise increment each cycle.
“Each element was modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to integrate these parts so they acted within a perfectly controlled sequence, sawing on every descending stroke and advancing on every upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of basic components.”
A fact that brings us up to the current challenge. The task is you to reinvent a key the basic concepts behind this historic invention.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine which converts rotary movement into up-and-down action. Your available these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two rods. A “guide”, that is a tube or sleeve into which one of the rods will fit snugly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a stand, so that the parts do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK time with the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please propose (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s greatest creation.
