🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Solve This? That Forgotten Dutch Invention That Shaped our Contemporary World There are numerous candidates to claim the title of “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. As per a new book, though, that title belongs to a mechanised timber mill invented through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593. “Prior to mechanised sawing, constructing a simple merchant vessel required around ten sawyers working over three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-powered sawmills, the same amount of processed timber might be manufactured within a week.” Thanks to their speedy mechanical saw, that turned timber to planks with almost no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels more quickly than any other nation, an advantage that sparked a century of Netherlands maritime, economic as well as artistic supremacy across the continent and the world. The First True Manufacturing Device Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues the writer, was “mankind’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. One component converted the circular motion into up-and-down motion to power the saw. Another component transformed the rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the log forward one precise increment each cycle. “Every component seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius was to combine these parts in order that the machine acted in a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing with each descending stroke and advancing on every upward stroke. It was a remarkably clever use of fundamental parts.” Which leads us to the current puzzle. I’d like for you to reinvent a key the basic ideas underpinning this historic machine. Round and Up Construct a mechanism that turns rotary movement to vertical action. You have these components only: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve into which a single the rods will fit snugly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so the parts don’t fall down.) I’ll be back at 5pm UK time featuring the answer. In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates as the world’s most impactful creation.