Can You Solve This? The Overlooked Dutch Creation Which Forged our Modern Globe
One can find many candidates to claim the designation as “planet’s most significant innovation.” The circular axle. The movable type. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that title should go to the automated sawmill invented by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to automated cutting, constructing a simple merchant vessel required approximately 10 sawyers laboring over 90 days,” notes the author. “Using wind-powered sawmills, an identical amount of processed timber could be manufactured in less than seven days.”
Thanks to their speedy automated cutter, that converted logs to planks using almost no manual labor, the Dutch could construct vessels faster compared to any other nation, an advantage that sparked a century of Dutch maritime, economic as well as cultural dominance across the continent and the world.
The First Genuine Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's sawmill, contends the writer, was “mankind’s initial true factory machine.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component converted its rotary movement into up-and-down motion to power the saw. Another component transformed that same rotary motion into a sideway’s movement advancing the timber toward the cutter. A ratchet system moved the log forward a measured step per cycle.
“Each element was simple on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to integrate them so the machine acted within a precisely synchronized order, cutting with each downward stroke and moving with each upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of fundamental components.”
A fact that leads us up to today’s challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s machine.
Round and Up
Construct a mechanism which converts rotary motion to up-and-down motion. You have these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “guide”, that is a cylinder or housing through which a single the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can mount components on a stand, so the parts do not collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK featuring the answer.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates as the planet’s greatest creation.
