Are You Able to Solve This? That Overlooked Dutch Creation Which Shaped our Contemporary Globe
One can find numerous candidates for the title of “planet’s greatest innovation.” The circular axle. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that title should go to a automated timber mill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised sawing, building a simple trading ship required around ten sawyers laboring for three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical quantity of processed timber might be manufactured within a week.”
Owing to this speedy automated cutter, which turned timber to boards with virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships more quickly than any other nation, which unleashed one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, financial as well as artistic dominance in the continent and the globe.
The Original Genuine Industrial Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, represented “mankind’s first true factory apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a wheel. A single part transformed its circular movement to vertical motion for the saw. A separate mechanism changed the rotary movement into a lateral movement feeding the log to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the log ahead a measured step each stroke.
“Every component was modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to integrate these parts so they acted in a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing with each downward motion while advancing with each return stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of basic components.”
Which brings us to today’s challenge. The task is you to reinvent one of the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Round and Up
Construct a machine that turns rotary movement to up-and-down action. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a tube or housing through which one of the rods can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can put things on a stand, so that the components do not collapse.)
The solution returns later today UK with the solution.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) candidates as the planet’s greatest creation.
