Are You Able to Crack This? That Forgotten Netherlands Creation Which Forged our Modern Globe

There are many contenders to claim the title of “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.

According to a recent publication, though, that honor belongs to the mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.

“Prior to mechanised sawing, building a simple trading ship necessitated around ten sawyers working over 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-driven lumber mills, an identical quantity of processed timber might be manufactured within seven days.”

Owing to this speedy automated saw, which converted logs to boards using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could build vessels faster compared to anyone else, which sparked a century of Netherlands naval, financial and artistic dominance in Europe and the globe.

The Original True Industrial Device

The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, represented “mankind’s initial true factory machine.” A windmill turned a wheel. A single part transformed its circular motion into up-and-down action for the saw. A separate mechanism changed the rotary motion into a lateral movement feeding the timber to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the log forward one precise increment each stroke.

“Each element seemed modest on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine them in order that they operated within a perfectly controlled order, cutting on every downward motion and moving on every upward motion. It was an astonishingly clever use of basic components.”

A fact that leads us up to today’s puzzle. The task is for you to reimagine one of the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s machine.

Round and Up

Design a machine that turns circular movement to up-and-down action. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or housing into which one of the bars will fit perfectly. (Consider that you can mount components on a base, so the components don’t collapse.)

I’ll be back later today UK featuring the solution.

In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, please propose (non obvious) contenders for the world’s most impactful invention.