Are You Able to Crack This? The Overlooked Dutch Creation Which Shaped our Modern World
There are many candidates to claim the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.
According to a new book, however, that title belongs to the automated timber mill conceived through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.
“Prior to mechanised cutting, constructing a simple merchant vessel required around ten lumberjacks working over 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same amount of cut lumber might be manufactured within a week.”
Owing to this speedy automated cutter, which converted timber into planks with virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to build ships more quickly than any other nation, which unleashed one hundred years of Dutch maritime, financial as well as cultural dominance in Europe and the world.
The First True Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s first true industrial apparatus.” A windmill turned a wheel. A single part converted the circular motion to vertical motion to power the saw. A separate mechanism transformed the spinning motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the log to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the wood ahead one precise increment each stroke.
“Every component was modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to integrate them in order that the machine operated within a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each downward motion while moving on every upward stroke. This constituted a remarkably intelligent application of basic components.”
A fact that leads us up to the current challenge. The task is for you to reinvent a key the basic ideas underpinning this historic machine.
Round and Up
Construct a machine that turns circular motion into vertical action. Your available these items only: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, which is a tube or housing through which a single the bars will fit snugly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so the parts do not collapse.)
The solution returns later today UK time with the answer.
Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (non obvious) candidates as the world’s greatest invention.
