Can You Solve This? That Overlooked Netherlands Creation That Forged the Modern Globe
One can find many contenders to claim the designation as “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
According to a new book, though, that title should go to a automated timber mill invented through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Prior to automated sawing, constructing a simple merchant vessel necessitated approximately ten sawyers working for three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-driven sawmills, the same quantity of processed timber could be produced within seven days.”
Owing to their rapid automated saw, which turned timber to boards using almost no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to construct vessels more quickly than any other nation, an advantage that unleashed a century of Dutch naval, financial and cultural supremacy across Europe and the world.
The Original True Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's sawmill, contends Dávila, was “mankind’s initial true factory apparatus.” A windmill rotated a wheel. One component converted the circular motion into up-and-down action for the cutting blade. Another component changed that same rotary motion into a lateral motion feeding the log to the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the log ahead one precise increment each stroke.
“Every component was modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so the machine operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each downward motion and moving on every upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent application of fundamental parts.”
Which leads us to the current challenge. The task is for you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind this historic machine.
Circular to Vertical
Design a mechanism that turns circular motion to up-and-down action. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve through which a single the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can put things on a base, so that the components do not collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK with the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please propose (non obvious) candidates as the planet’s most impactful invention.