Can You Solve This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Shaped our Contemporary Globe
There are numerous candidates to claim the title of “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The combustion motor.
According to a new book, however, that honor belongs to a automated timber mill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.
“Before automated cutting, building a modest merchant vessel necessitated around 10 lumberjacks laboring over 90 days,” notes the author. “With wind-driven sawmills, the same amount of cut lumber could be produced in less than seven days.”
Owing to their rapid mechanical cutter, that converted logs into planks using almost no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels more quickly compared to any other nation, which sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, economic and artistic supremacy across Europe and the globe.
The First Genuine Manufacturing Device
The inventor's sawmill, contends the writer, represented “humanity’s first true factory machine.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part converted the rotary motion into up-and-down action for the cutting blade. Another component changed the rotary movement into a lateral movement advancing the log toward the cutter. A ratchet system moved the log forward a measured step per cycle.
“Every component was modest by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so the machine acted within a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing with each descending stroke and advancing on every return motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of basic parts.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s challenge. The task is for you to reinvent a key the basic concepts underpinning this historic machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a mechanism which converts rotary movement into vertical motion. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or sleeve through which one of the rods will fit snugly. (Assume you can put things on a stand, so that the components do not fall down.)
I’ll be back later today UK featuring the answer.
In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates for the planet’s greatest invention.