"Corneliszoon's sawmill, argues Davila, was mankind's first true industrial machine. A windmill turned a wheel. One component transformed the rotary motion into up-and-down motion for the cutting blade. Another component transformed the rotary motion into a sideway's motion feeding the log to the blade. A ratchet system moved the log forward one precise increment per cycle. Each element was modest on its own."
"Before mechanised sawing, constructing a modest merchant vessel required approximately ten sawyers working for three months, writes Jaime Davila in Forgotten. With wind-powered sawmills, the same quantity of processed timber could be produced in less than a week. Thanks to their speedy mechanical saw, which turned logs into planks with almost no human effort, the Dutch could build ships faster than anyone else, which unleashed a century of Dutch maritime, economic and cultural dominance in Europe and the world."
Cornelis Corneliszoon's 1593 mechanised sawmill used wind power to rotate a wheel and convert rotary motion into coordinated reciprocating and feeding motions. The system turned logs into planks with minimal human effort, reducing the sawing time required for a modest merchant vessel from three months of ten sawyers to less than a week. The design combined a mechanism converting rotary to up-and-down motion for the blade, another converting rotary to sideways motion to feed the log, and a ratchet providing precise incremental advances each cycle. The sequence cut on the downward stroke and advanced on the return stroke, enabling rapid ship construction and broad economic impact.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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