🔗 Share this article Can You Solve It? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged the Contemporary Globe One can find many candidates to claim the designation as “planet’s most significant innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The combustion motor. According to a new book, however, that title belongs to a automated timber mill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593. “Prior to mechanised sawing, constructing a simple trading ship required around 10 lumberjacks working over 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven sawmills, the same quantity of cut lumber could be produced within a week.” Owing to their speedy mechanical saw, which turned logs to boards with almost no manual labor, the Dutch were able to build ships more quickly compared to any other nation, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Dutch maritime, economic as well as cultural supremacy across Europe and the globe. The Original Genuine Manufacturing Machine Corneliszoon’s sawmill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial true industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a wheel. A single part transformed its circular movement to vertical action for the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed the spinning movement into a lateral motion feeding the timber to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood forward one precise increment per cycle. “Each element was modest on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to combine them in order that the machine operated in a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting with each downward motion and advancing with each return motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent use of basic parts.” A fact that leads us up to the current challenge. The task is for you to reimagine a key the basic concepts behind this historic machine. Circular to Vertical Construct a mechanism that turns rotary movement into vertical motion. Your available these items exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, which is a tube or sleeve through which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Assume you can put things on a stand, so that the components don’t fall down.) The solution returns at 5pm UK time featuring the answer. Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to propose (non obvious) contenders for the world’s most impactful invention.