Are You Able to Solve This? That Forgotten Dutch Invention Which Shaped our Contemporary World
One can find numerous candidates to claim the title of “planet’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.
As per a recent publication, though, that title should go to the automated timber mill conceived through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before mechanised cutting, constructing a simple trading ship required around 10 sawyers working for 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered sawmills, an identical quantity of cut lumber might be manufactured in less than a week.”
Owing to their rapid automated saw, which converted timber into planks with virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could construct ships more quickly than anyone else, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Netherlands naval, financial and artistic dominance in the continent and the world.
The Original Genuine Manufacturing Machine
Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues the writer, represented “mankind’s initial authentic industrial machine.” A wind turbine rotated a wheel. A single part converted the rotary movement into vertical motion for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed that same rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the timber toward the blade. A ratchet system shifted the wood forward a measured step each cycle.
“Every component seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to integrate them in order that the machine operated in a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting on every downward stroke while moving with each return motion. It was an astonishingly intelligent application of basic components.”
A fact that brings us up to the current puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent one of the basic concepts behind Corneliszoon’s invention.
Circular to Vertical
Design a mechanism which converts circular motion to up-and-down motion. Your available these components only: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or housing through which a single the rods can slide perfectly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so that the parts don’t collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK with the solution.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to propose (non obvious) contenders as the world’s greatest invention.
