Are You Able to Solve It? The Forgotten Dutch Creation That Shaped our Contemporary World
One can find numerous contenders for the title of “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, however, that title should go to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Before mechanised sawing, building a modest trading ship required around 10 lumberjacks laboring for 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-driven sawmills, the same quantity of cut lumber could be produced within seven days.”
Thanks to this speedy automated saw, that turned timber to planks with virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships faster compared to any other nation, which sparked one hundred years of Dutch maritime, economic and cultural dominance across Europe and the world.
The Original Genuine Industrial Machine
The inventor's sawmill, argues the writer, was “humanity’s initial true factory apparatus.” A windmill turned a wheel. One component transformed the circular motion into up-and-down motion for the cutting blade. Another component transformed that same rotary movement into a sideway’s movement feeding the timber toward the cutter. A ratchet system moved the wood forward one precise increment per stroke.
“Each element was simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts in order that they acted within a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing with each descending stroke and advancing on every upward motion. It was an astonishingly clever use of basic parts.”
Which leads us up to the current challenge. I’d like for you to reimagine a key the basic ideas behind this historic machine.
Round and Up
Design a mechanism which converts circular motion to up-and-down action. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve into which one of the rods can slide snugly. (Assume you can put things on a stand, so the parts do not collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK time featuring the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (less celebrated) candidates as the planet’s most impactful invention.
