🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Crack This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Shaped our Contemporary Globe There are many contenders for the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. According to a new book, though, that title belongs to a mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593. “Prior to mechanised sawing, constructing a modest merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 sawyers working for three months,” notes the author. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, an identical amount of cut lumber could be manufactured in less than seven days.” Owing to this rapid automated saw, that turned timber into boards with almost no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships more quickly than anyone else, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Dutch maritime, economic as well as cultural supremacy across the continent and the world. The Original True Industrial Machine The inventor's lumber mill, contends the writer, was “humanity’s initial authentic industrial apparatus.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component converted the rotary movement into vertical motion to power the saw. A separate mechanism changed that same rotary movement into a lateral movement feeding the log toward the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the log ahead one precise increment each stroke. “Every component seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so they operated in a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting with each downward stroke and moving with each upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of basic parts.” A fact that brings us up to today’s puzzle. I’d like for you to reimagine one of the fundamental concepts behind this historic invention. Circular to Vertical Construct a machine which converts circular movement to vertical action. You have these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve into which one of the rods will fit perfectly. (Consider that you can put things on a stand, so the components don’t fall down.) The solution returns later today UK with the answer. In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Instead, please propose (non obvious) contenders for the world’s greatest invention.