🔗 Share this article Can You Crack This? The Forgotten Dutch Creation Which Shaped our Contemporary Globe There are numerous candidates to claim the title of “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. As per a recent publication, however, that title should go to a mechanised timber mill invented through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593. “Prior to mechanised cutting, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated around 10 sawyers laboring for three months,” notes the author. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, an identical quantity of cut lumber might be produced in less than seven days.” Thanks to their rapid automated saw, that turned timber into boards using almost no manual labor, Dutch builders were able to build ships faster than anyone else, which unleashed a century of Dutch naval, economic and artistic dominance across Europe and the globe. The Original Genuine Manufacturing Machine Corneliszoon’s sawmill, argues Dávila, represented “mankind’s first true industrial apparatus.” A windmill turned a gear. A single part transformed the rotary motion to up-and-down motion for the saw. Another component transformed the rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood ahead one precise increment each cycle. “Each element seemed modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to combine these parts so the machine acted within a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting on every downward motion while moving with each upward motion. This constituted a remarkably intelligent use of fundamental components.” Which brings us up to the current puzzle. I’d like for you to reimagine one of the fundamental ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine. Round and Up Design a machine which converts rotary movement into vertical motion. Your available these components only: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or housing into which one of the rods will fit snugly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so that the parts do not fall down.) I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solution. Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, please suggest (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s greatest creation.