Are You Able to Crack This? The Forgotten Netherlands Invention That Shaped our Modern World
One can find many candidates to claim the title of “world’s most significant innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The steam engine.
According to a recent publication, though, that honor should go to the mechanised timber mill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.
“Before automated sawing, constructing a simple merchant vessel necessitated around 10 sawyers laboring for 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-powered sawmills, an identical quantity of processed timber could be produced within seven days.”
Owing to this speedy mechanical saw, which turned logs to planks using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch were able to construct vessels faster than any other nation, which sparked a century of Netherlands naval, financial as well as cultural supremacy across the continent and the globe.
The Original Genuine Industrial Machine
The inventor's sawmill, argues Dávila, represented “humanity’s first authentic factory apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a gear. A single part transformed its rotary movement into vertical action for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed that same spinning motion into a lateral motion feeding the timber to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood ahead one precise increment each stroke.
“Every component was simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to integrate them in order that the machine acted in a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each downward motion and advancing on every return motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent application of fundamental components.”
Which brings us up to the current puzzle. I’d like for you to reimagine a key the basic ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine which converts rotary movement into vertical motion. Your available these items only: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “guide”, which is a cylinder or sleeve through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that it is possible to mount components on a base, so that the components do not collapse.)
I’ll be back at 5pm UK time featuring the solution.
Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to propose (non obvious) contenders for the world’s most impactful creation.
