🔗 Share this article Can You Crack This? That Overlooked Netherlands Creation That Shaped the Modern Globe There are many contenders for the title of “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor. As per a new book, however, that title should go to the automated timber mill invented by Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593. “Prior to automated sawing, constructing a modest merchant vessel required around 10 lumberjacks laboring for three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered sawmills, an identical amount of cut lumber could be produced within a week.” Thanks to their rapid mechanical cutter, which turned timber to boards using virtually no human effort, the Dutch were able to build vessels faster compared to any other nation, which sparked a century of Dutch maritime, financial as well as artistic dominance across the continent and the world. The Original True Industrial Device Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial true industrial apparatus.” A windmill rotated a wheel. A single part transformed its circular movement into vertical motion to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed the rotary motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the log to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the log ahead one precise increment each stroke. “Each element was simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to integrate them so they operated in a precisely synchronized order, sawing with each descending motion and moving with each upward stroke. It was an astonishingly clever application of basic components.” A fact that leads us to today’s puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind Corneliszoon’s machine. Circular to Vertical Construct a mechanism which converts circular movement into vertical motion. Your available these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “guide”, which is a tube or sleeve into which one of the rods can slide perfectly. (Assume you can put things on a base, so the components don’t fall down.) I’ll be back later today UK featuring the answer. In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates as the planet’s greatest invention.