Are You Able to Solve It? That Overlooked Netherlands Invention Which Forged our Modern World

There are many candidates for the title of “world’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.

As per a recent publication, however, that title belongs to the mechanised timber mill conceived by Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.

“Prior to automated cutting, building a simple merchant vessel required approximately ten lumberjacks laboring over 90 days,” writes the author. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of cut lumber could be manufactured in less than seven days.”

Owing to their rapid automated saw, that turned logs into boards using almost no human effort, the Dutch were able to construct vessels faster compared to any other nation, an advantage that sparked one hundred years of Dutch maritime, financial and artistic supremacy across the continent and the globe.

The First Genuine Industrial Machine

The inventor's sawmill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s initial true industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a wheel. One component converted its rotary movement into vertical motion to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed the spinning motion into a sideway’s movement advancing the log to the blade. A ratchet system shifted the log forward one precise increment per cycle.

“Every component seemed modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to combine these parts in order that they acted within a perfectly controlled sequence, sawing on every downward stroke and moving on every return stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of fundamental components.”

Which leads us up to today’s puzzle. The task is for you to reimagine one of the basic concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine.

Round and Up

Construct a mechanism that turns circular movement into up-and-down motion. Your available these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, which is a cylinder or housing into which one of the rods will fit perfectly. (Consider that it is possible to mount components on a stand, so that the components do not collapse.)

I’ll be back at 5pm UK featuring the solution.

In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) contenders as the planet’s greatest invention.