Can You Crack It? The Forgotten Dutch Creation Which Forged our Contemporary World

One can find many candidates for the designation as “world’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.

As per a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to the mechanised timber mill invented through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.

“Prior to automated sawing, building a modest trading ship necessitated around ten sawyers laboring for three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-powered sawmills, the same amount of cut lumber could be manufactured in less than a week.”

Owing to their rapid automated saw, that turned logs to boards with virtually no manual labor, the Dutch could construct ships more quickly compared to anyone else, which sparked one hundred years of Dutch maritime, financial as well as artistic supremacy in Europe and the world.

The Original True Industrial Machine

The inventor's sawmill, contends the writer, was “mankind’s initial true factory machine.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component transformed its circular movement to vertical motion for the cutting blade. Another component transformed the rotary movement into a sideway’s movement feeding the timber to the cutter. A ratchet system moved the wood ahead one precise increment per cycle.

“Each element seemed simple on its own. Corneliszoon’s genius was to combine these parts in order that they operated within a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting with each descending stroke and moving with each upward stroke. It was an astonishingly clever application of basic parts.”

A fact that brings us up to the current puzzle. The task is you to reinvent a key the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s machine.

Round and Up

Design a mechanism that turns circular movement into vertical motion. You have these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a tube or housing through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can mount components on a stand, so that the parts don’t collapse.)

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

Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) contenders for the planet’s most impactful invention.