Can You Solve This? That Overlooked Netherlands Creation Which Shaped the Contemporary Globe
One can find many candidates for the title of “world’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
As per a recent publication, though, that title should go to the automated timber mill conceived through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised cutting, constructing a simple trading ship required approximately ten sawyers laboring for 90 days,” notes the author. “With wind-driven sawmills, the same quantity of cut lumber might be produced in less than a week.”
Owing to this speedy automated cutter, that turned logs to boards using virtually no human effort, the Dutch were able to build ships more quickly than any other nation, an advantage that sparked one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, financial as well as cultural dominance across Europe and the globe.
The Original Genuine Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's sawmill, contends the writer, was “humanity’s initial true factory machine.” A windmill rotated a wheel. A single part converted the rotary motion into up-and-down action to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed that same rotary movement into a sideway’s movement feeding the log to the blade. A ratchet system shifted the log forward a measured step each stroke.
“Each element seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius was to integrate them in order that they operated within a precisely synchronized order, sawing on every downward motion and advancing on every return motion. It was an astonishingly clever application of fundamental parts.”
A fact that brings us to today’s puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent a key the fundamental concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a machine which converts circular movement to vertical action. You have these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or sleeve through which a single the rods will fit snugly. (Assume you can mount components on a base, so the components do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please propose (less celebrated) contenders as the planet’s most impactful invention.
