Can You Crack It? That Forgotten Dutch Creation Which Shaped the Modern World
One can find numerous candidates to claim the title of “world’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The combustion motor.
As per a recent publication, though, that honor should go to a automated timber mill conceived through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Before automated cutting, constructing a modest merchant vessel required approximately 10 lumberjacks laboring for three months,” writes the author. “With wind-driven sawmills, the same amount of processed timber might be manufactured within a week.”
Owing to their rapid automated cutter, which turned timber into planks with almost no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to construct vessels more quickly than any other nation, which unleashed a century of Netherlands naval, financial as well as cultural dominance in the continent and the globe.
The Original True Manufacturing Device
The inventor's lumber mill, contends Dávila, was “humanity’s initial true factory apparatus.” A windmill turned a wheel. One component converted its circular motion to vertical motion for the saw. Another component transformed the spinning motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the log to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the log ahead a measured step each stroke.
“Every component seemed simple on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so the machine acted within a perfectly controlled order, sawing with each descending motion while moving with each upward stroke. It was an astonishingly intelligent application of fundamental components.”
Which leads us up to today’s challenge. I’d like for you to reinvent one of the fundamental concepts behind this historic invention.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a mechanism that turns circular movement to up-and-down motion. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, that is a cylinder or housing into which one of the rods will fit perfectly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so that the components do not fall down.)
The solution returns later today UK featuring the solution.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to suggest (non obvious) contenders as the world’s greatest creation.
