Are You Able to Solve This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation Which Forged the Contemporary World
One can find many candidates to claim the designation as “world’s greatest innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The combustion motor.
As per a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to a mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.
“Prior to mechanised cutting, building a modest trading ship necessitated around ten sawyers working for 90 days,” writes the author. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, an identical quantity of cut lumber could be produced within seven days.”
Thanks to their rapid mechanical saw, which converted timber into planks with virtually no human effort, Dutch builders could construct ships faster than any other nation, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, economic as well as cultural dominance in the continent and the world.
The First Genuine Manufacturing Machine
The inventor's lumber mill, contends the writer, was “humanity’s initial true industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a wheel. A single part transformed the rotary movement into vertical action for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed that same spinning motion into a sideway’s movement advancing the log toward the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the log ahead a measured step per cycle.
“Each element seemed modest by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so the machine operated within a perfectly controlled sequence, sawing with each downward stroke and advancing on every return motion. It was an astonishingly clever use of fundamental parts.”
Which leads us up to the current puzzle. I’d like you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind Corneliszoon’s machine.
Circular to Vertical
Construct a machine that turns rotary movement into up-and-down motion. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve into which one of the rods can slide perfectly. (Consider that it is possible to mount components on a base, so that the parts do not collapse.)
The solution returns at 5pm UK time featuring the answer.
In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to propose (non obvious) contenders as the world’s greatest creation.
