Can You Solve It? The Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Forged our Contemporary World

One can find many candidates for the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The combustion motor.

According to a recent publication, though, that title should go to a mechanised timber mill conceived through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.

“Prior to automated sawing, building a modest trading ship necessitated around 10 sawyers laboring over three months,” notes the author. “Using wind-driven sawmills, an identical quantity of cut lumber might be manufactured within a week.”

Thanks to their speedy mechanical saw, that converted timber into planks using virtually no human effort, Dutch builders were able to build ships faster than anyone else, which sparked one hundred years of Netherlands naval, financial as well as artistic dominance across Europe and the world.

The Original True Manufacturing Machine

Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends Dávila, was “mankind’s first authentic industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component transformed its circular movement to up-and-down action to power the cutting blade. Another component transformed that same rotary movement into a sideway’s motion feeding the timber to the cutter. A ratchet system moved the wood forward one precise increment per cycle.

“Every component seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to combine them in order that the machine operated within a precisely synchronized order, cutting on every downward stroke while moving with each upward motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent use of fundamental parts.”

A fact that leads us up to today’s challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the basic ideas underpinning this historic machine.

Round and Up

Design a mechanism that turns rotary motion to vertical action. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that it is possible to mount components on a base, so the components do not fall down.)

I’ll be back later today UK with the answer.

Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, please propose (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s greatest invention.