🔗 Share this article Can You Solve It? That Overlooked Dutch Invention Which Shaped our Contemporary Globe One can find many candidates to claim the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine. As per a recent publication, though, that honor belongs to the mechanised timber mill conceived through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593. “Before automated sawing, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 sawyers laboring over three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven lumber mills, an identical quantity of processed timber might be produced in less than a week.” Thanks to their speedy mechanical saw, which converted timber into boards using almost no human effort, the Dutch were able to build ships more quickly than anyone else, an advantage that unleashed a century of Dutch maritime, economic and artistic dominance across Europe and the globe. The First True Industrial Device Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, argues Dávila, was “mankind’s first authentic factory apparatus.” A wind turbine turned a gear. A single part transformed the circular motion into up-and-down action for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed that same spinning movement into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber to the cutter. A ratchet system moved the log forward a measured step per stroke. “Each element was simple on its own. The Dutchman’s genius was to integrate these parts in order that the machine acted within a precisely synchronized order, sawing on every downward stroke while moving on every upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of fundamental parts.” A fact that leads us to the current challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the basic ideas underpinning this historic machine. Circular to Vertical Construct a machine that turns rotary motion to vertical motion. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve into which one of the rods can slide perfectly. (Assume you can mount components on a stand, so the components do not fall down.) I’ll be back at 5pm UK time with the solution. Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please suggest (non obvious) candidates for the world’s greatest creation.