🔗 Share this article Can You Solve It? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged the Modern World One can find numerous contenders for the title of “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine. As per a recent publication, however, that title belongs to the mechanised sawmill conceived through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593. “Before mechanised sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required around ten sawyers working over 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-driven sawmills, an identical amount of processed timber could be manufactured in less than a week.” Thanks to their speedy mechanical saw, which converted logs into planks with almost no human effort, Dutch builders could build ships more quickly compared to any other nation, which sparked a century of Dutch naval, economic and cultural dominance across Europe and the globe. The Original Genuine Manufacturing Machine Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues Dávila, represented “mankind’s initial true factory machine.” A wind turbine rotated a wheel. One component transformed its rotary movement to vertical motion for the saw. Another component changed that same rotary motion into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber toward the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the wood ahead one precise increment per cycle. “Each element seemed simple on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine them in order that they operated in a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each descending stroke and advancing on every upward motion. It was a remarkably intelligent use of basic parts.” Which brings us up to today’s challenge. The task is you to reimagine a key the basic ideas behind Corneliszoon’s invention. Round and Up Construct a mechanism which converts rotary motion to vertical motion. You have these components only: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or housing through which one of the rods will fit perfectly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so that the parts do not collapse.) I’ll be back at 5pm UK time with the solution. In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to propose (less celebrated) candidates as the world’s greatest creation.