Are You Able to Crack This? That Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged our Modern World
There are many candidates to claim the designation as “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a new book, however, that honor belongs to a mechanised timber mill conceived through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before mechanised cutting, building a modest merchant vessel necessitated around 10 sawyers working for three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-powered lumber mills, an identical amount of processed timber might be manufactured in less than seven days.”
Owing to this rapid automated saw, that converted logs to boards using virtually no human effort, the Dutch were able to build vessels more quickly compared to any other nation, which unleashed a century of Dutch maritime, economic as well as cultural supremacy in Europe and the world.
The First Genuine Industrial Machine
Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, argues Dávila, was “mankind’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a wheel. A single part converted its circular movement to vertical action for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed that same rotary movement into a lateral movement feeding the timber to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the wood forward a measured step per cycle.
“Each element was simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to integrate them so they acted in a precisely synchronized order, cutting on every descending stroke while moving on every upward motion. It was an astonishingly intelligent use of basic components.”
A fact that brings us to today’s challenge. The task is you to reimagine one of the basic ideas underpinning this historic machine.
Round and Up
Construct a mechanism which converts circular movement into vertical action. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a tube or housing through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so the components do not fall down.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK featuring the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) contenders as the world’s most impactful invention.
