Can You Solve This? The Forgotten Netherlands Invention Which Forged our Modern World
One can find many contenders to claim the title of “planet’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
According to a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to a automated sawmill conceived by Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before automated sawing, constructing a simple merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 sawyers laboring for three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven lumber mills, an identical amount of cut lumber might be manufactured within a week.”
Thanks to their rapid automated cutter, that turned timber to planks using almost no human effort, the Dutch were able to construct vessels faster than anyone else, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Dutch naval, economic as well as cultural supremacy across Europe and the globe.
The First Genuine Industrial Machine
The inventor's sawmill, argues the writer, was “mankind’s initial authentic factory apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a gear. One component converted the circular motion to up-and-down motion for the cutting blade. Another component changed the rotary motion into a lateral movement feeding the log toward the blade. A geared mechanism moved the log ahead one precise increment per cycle.
“Every component seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to combine these parts so they operated within a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing on every downward stroke and advancing with each upward stroke. It was an astonishingly intelligent use of fundamental components.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the fundamental ideas underpinning this historic invention.
Round and Up
Design a machine that turns circular movement to vertical motion. Your available these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Assume you can mount components on a base, so that the components don’t collapse.)
The solution returns later today UK time with the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (non obvious) contenders for the world’s greatest invention.
