🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Solve This? The Overlooked Dutch Invention That Shaped the Modern Globe One can find many candidates to claim the designation as “planet’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine. According to a recent publication, though, that honor belongs to the mechanised sawmill conceived by Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593. “Before automated sawing, constructing a simple merchant vessel necessitated approximately 10 sawyers working over 90 days,” writes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same amount of cut lumber could be produced within a week.” Owing to their rapid automated saw, which converted timber to planks using almost no human effort, the Dutch could construct ships faster compared to anyone else, which sparked a century of Dutch naval, financial and cultural dominance across the continent and the globe. The Original True Manufacturing Device The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, represented “mankind’s initial authentic industrial machine.” A wind turbine turned a gear. A single part converted its circular motion into up-and-down action for the saw. Another component transformed that same rotary motion into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber to the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood ahead a measured step each cycle. “Every component was simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to combine them so they acted in a perfectly controlled sequence, sawing on every downward motion and moving on every return motion. It was an astonishingly intelligent application of basic components.” A fact that leads us up to the current puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent a key the basic concepts behind this historic invention. Round and Up Construct a mechanism that turns rotary movement into up-and-down motion. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or sleeve into which a single the bars will fit perfectly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a base, so the components don’t fall down.) The solution returns at 5pm UK time featuring the solution. Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Instead, please propose (non obvious) candidates as the planet’s most impactful invention.