Are You Able to Crack It? The Forgotten Netherlands Invention Which Shaped our Contemporary Globe
There are many candidates to claim the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The circular axle. The printing press. The steam engine.
As per a new book, however, that honor belongs to a automated timber mill invented by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Before mechanised cutting, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated around ten sawyers laboring for 90 days,” notes the author. “Using wind-driven sawmills, an identical amount of cut lumber could be produced in less than a week.”
Thanks to this rapid automated cutter, which converted timber to planks with virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could construct vessels faster compared to any other nation, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Dutch naval, economic as well as artistic supremacy in the continent and the world.
The Original Genuine Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s initial authentic industrial apparatus.” A windmill turned a gear. A single part converted the circular movement to vertical motion for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed the rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the log to the blade. A ratchet system moved the wood ahead one precise increment each stroke.
“Each element seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to combine these parts so they operated within a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting on every descending motion and moving on every return motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of fundamental components.”
Which leads us up to the current challenge. The task is you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind this historic machine.
Round and Up
Construct a machine which converts rotary motion to up-and-down action. You have these items only: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a tube or sleeve into which a single the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that you can mount components on a stand, so that the components do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK time featuring the answer.
In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates for the planet’s most impactful creation.
