We’ve seen how being able to effectively split wood was important to earlier societies that aimed to build ships. Both riving and pit-sawing were effective ways to turn logs into the needed boards, but they were also highly time-consuming and laborious. For a country to win the naval race, they’d need a radical new production technology, something that would blow the competition away.
“Blow” is the right word, as it turns out. In 1594, an ingenious Dutchman invented something amazing: A wind-powered sawmill. Cornelis Corneliszoon, who described himself as “a poor farmer with wife and children” figured out that he could harness the power of the wind and attach it to a whipsaw to make it go up and down. He then added another gear to the crankshaft that would advance the material by means of what looks to be a rack and pinion. Here is the drawing from the patent granted to Corneliszoon in 1597:
The result of Corneliszoon’s invention was much faster sawing, without the calorie-burning. Men were still needed to maintain the machine’s operation, of course, but the merits of the design were so obvious that others immediately began copying it (leading Corneliszoon to finally apply for a patent three years later).
The importance of the the wind-powered sawmill taking off in the Netherlands cannot be understated. Wood production didn’t double, triple or quadruple; it grew by a factor of thirty, or 3,000%. It was all in the time savings: Using the pit-saw method, sawyers could process 60 logs over a span of 120 days. Using a wind-powered sawmill, they could break down 60 logs in four or five days. What used to take four months now took less than a week.
As the sawmills began to proliferate and be improved upon, the Dutch began cranking out ships. In the 1600s they became the world’s foremost naval power, destroying a large fleet of their Spanish antagonists in 1607. They began establishing colonies or trading posts, depending on how politically correct or revisionist you are, as far as Taiwan. In 1614 they founded New Amsterdam on a little island called Manhattan, and named a nearby district Breukelen, which we would later bastardize as “Brooklyn.”
By 1650 the Netherlands had some 16,000 merchant ships that sailed all around the world, facilitating their trade. The English weren’t happy with this and a series of Anglo-Dutch wars were prosecuted; this resulted in the Dutch delivering England’s little-talked-about worst naval defeat in history in 1667. Beefs continued, and in 1688 William III of the Dutch Republic sailed to England with a large fleet, toppled the King, and had himself crowned King of England to put a stop to it.
The bottom line is that the Dutch successes of the 1600s were predicated on them having a large fleet. Of course other things were also necessary, skilled businessmen and politicians and military commanders, et cetera, but it’s not unrealistic to think that without Corneliszoon revolutionizing the production method of timber, they’d not have made it as far as they did.
So enough with the history talk, let’s take a look at this wondrous, completely green sawmill technology. While Corneliszoon’s own didn’t survive the 400-plus years until now, there is a rather amazing recreation of a 1600s Dutch wind-powered sawmill, built from the plans pictured above, called Het Jonge Schaap in Zaandam, outside of Amsterdam:
http://www.core77.com/posts/53123/A-Brief-History-of-Wood-Splitting-Technology-Part-3-The-Wind-Powered-Sawmill-That-Changed-Dutch-History