🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Solve This? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Forged the Contemporary World One can find numerous contenders to claim the designation as “planet’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor. As per a new book, though, that title belongs to a mechanised timber mill conceived by Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593. “Before automated cutting, constructing a simple merchant vessel required around 10 sawyers laboring for 90 days,” notes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of cut lumber could be manufactured in less than a week.” Thanks to this rapid mechanical saw, which turned logs to boards using almost no manual labor, the Dutch could construct vessels more quickly than any other nation, which sparked one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, financial as well as cultural dominance in Europe and the world. The First True Manufacturing Machine Corneliszoon’s sawmill, contends the writer, was “mankind’s first true industrial machine.” A wind turbine turned a gear. One component transformed its circular motion into vertical action for the saw. Another component transformed the rotary motion into a sideway’s motion feeding the timber toward the cutter. A ratchet system moved the wood ahead a measured step each cycle. “Each element seemed modest by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine them so they acted within a precisely synchronized sequence, sawing on every downward stroke and moving with each return motion. This constituted a remarkably clever use of basic components.” Which leads us to today’s challenge. I’d like for you to reinvent a key the fundamental concepts underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine. Circular to Vertical Design a machine which converts circular movement into vertical motion. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, which is a tube or housing into which one of the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that you can mount components on a base, so the parts do not fall down.) I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solution. In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please propose (less celebrated) candidates for the planet’s greatest invention.