Are You Able to Solve This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation Which Forged our Contemporary World
There are many candidates to claim the title of “world’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a new book, though, that honor belongs to the mechanised timber mill conceived through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Before automated cutting, building a modest merchant vessel required around 10 sawyers laboring over three months,” writes the author. “Using wind-driven sawmills, an identical quantity of cut lumber might be manufactured within seven days.”
Thanks to their speedy automated cutter, that turned timber into planks using virtually no human effort, the Dutch could build vessels more quickly than anyone else, which sparked one hundred years of Dutch naval, economic as well as artistic supremacy across the continent and the globe.
The Original True Industrial Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, contends the writer, represented “humanity’s initial true factory apparatus.” A windmill turned a gear. A single part converted the circular motion to vertical motion for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed the rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the log toward the blade. A ratchet system shifted the log ahead one precise increment per stroke.
“Each element was modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine them so the machine acted within a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting with each descending stroke and moving with each upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of basic parts.”
A fact that brings us up to the current puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent one of the fundamental concepts behind this historic machine.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a mechanism which converts circular motion into up-and-down motion. You have these components only: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or sleeve into which one of the rods can slide snugly. (Assume it is possible to mount components on a stand, so that the components don’t collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the answer.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Instead, please propose (less celebrated) candidates for the world’s greatest creation.
