Are You Able to Solve It? The Forgotten Dutch Invention That Shaped the Contemporary Globe
There are numerous candidates to claim the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The circular axle. The movable type. The steam engine.
As per a new book, however, that title belongs to the mechanised sawmill invented by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Before mechanised cutting, building a simple merchant vessel required approximately 10 lumberjacks laboring over three months,” writes the author. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, an identical amount of cut lumber could be produced in less than seven days.”
Thanks to this rapid automated saw, that turned logs to planks using virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to construct ships faster compared to any other nation, which sparked a century of Netherlands naval, financial and artistic supremacy across the continent and the world.
The Original Genuine Industrial Device
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, contends the writer, represented “mankind’s initial true factory apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part transformed the circular motion to up-and-down motion to power the saw. Another component changed that same rotary movement into a lateral motion feeding the log toward the blade. A ratchet system shifted the wood forward one precise increment each stroke.
“Every component seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine them in order that they operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each descending motion and moving with each return motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of fundamental components.”
Which leads us to today’s challenge. The task is you to reinvent one of the basic ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a mechanism which converts rotary movement into vertical action. Your available these items only: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve into which a single the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can put things on a base, so that the components don’t collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK featuring the answer.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to propose (less celebrated) contenders for the world’s most impactful creation.
