🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Solve This? The Overlooked Netherlands Creation Which Forged our Modern Globe One can find many candidates to claim the title of “world’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor. According to a new book, though, that title should go to the mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593. “Before automated sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required approximately ten sawyers laboring over three months,” writes the author. “With wind-powered sawmills, the same amount of processed timber might be produced in less than seven days.” Thanks to their rapid mechanical saw, which converted timber to planks using almost no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build vessels more quickly than anyone else, which unleashed a century of Netherlands naval, economic and artistic supremacy across the continent and the world. The Original True Industrial Device Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues the writer, represented “humanity’s first authentic industrial apparatus.” A windmill turned a wheel. One component converted its rotary movement to up-and-down motion for the saw. Another component transformed the spinning motion into a lateral motion advancing the log to the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the wood ahead a measured step per cycle. “Each element seemed simple by itself. The Dutchman’s genius was to integrate these parts so they operated in a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting on every downward stroke while moving with each upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever use of basic components.” A fact that leads us up to today’s puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent a key the fundamental concepts behind this historic invention. Round and Up Design a mechanism which converts circular motion into vertical motion. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve through which one of the rods will fit snugly. (Consider that you can mount components on a base, so that the parts do not collapse.) I’ll be back later today UK time featuring the solution. In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) contenders for the world’s most impactful invention.