Can You Solve This? The Overlooked Dutch Invention That Shaped our Contemporary World
There are numerous contenders for the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
As per a new book, however, that title belongs to a automated timber mill conceived through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Before automated cutting, constructing a modest merchant vessel required approximately ten lumberjacks working for three months,” notes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same amount of cut lumber might be produced in less than a week.”
Owing to their speedy automated saw, which turned logs to planks with almost no human effort, the Dutch could build vessels faster than any other nation, which unleashed a century of Dutch maritime, economic as well as cultural supremacy in the continent and the globe.
The First True Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, argues the writer, was “mankind’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A windmill rotated a gear. A single part transformed the rotary motion to up-and-down motion to power the saw. Another component transformed that same spinning movement into a lateral movement feeding the log toward the blade. A ratchet system moved the wood forward a measured step each stroke.
“Each element was modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to integrate them in order that they acted in a precisely synchronized order, sawing on every downward stroke and advancing with each upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of basic components.”
Which brings us up to the current puzzle. I’d like you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind this historic invention.
Round and Up
Construct a machine which converts circular movement to vertical action. Your available these items only: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a tube or sleeve into which one of the bars will fit perfectly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a base, so that the parts don’t collapse.)
The solution returns later today UK time with the answer.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please propose (less celebrated) candidates as the planet’s most impactful creation.
