🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Solve It? The Overlooked Netherlands Invention That Forged the Modern Globe One can find many candidates for the designation as “planet’s greatest invention.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. As per a recent publication, though, that honor belongs to the automated sawmill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593. “Before automated cutting, constructing a modest merchant vessel necessitated approximately ten sawyers laboring over 90 days,” notes the author. “With wind-powered lumber mills, the same amount of cut lumber could be produced in less than a week.” Owing to their rapid automated saw, which converted logs to planks using virtually no human effort, the Dutch were able to construct vessels more quickly than any other nation, an advantage that sparked one hundred years of Netherlands naval, financial as well as cultural supremacy across Europe and the globe. The Original Genuine Industrial Device The inventor's sawmill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial true industrial machine.” A wind turbine turned a wheel. One component converted its rotary movement into up-and-down motion to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism transformed that same rotary movement into a lateral movement feeding the log to the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the wood forward a measured step per stroke. “Every component was simple on its own. Corneliszoon’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so they acted in a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting with each descending motion and moving on every return stroke. It was an astonishingly clever use of basic parts.” Which brings us to the current puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent a key the fundamental ideas behind Corneliszoon’s invention. Round and Up Construct a mechanism that turns rotary movement to vertical action. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, which is a tube or housing into which a single the rods will fit perfectly. (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 time with the answer. Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (less celebrated) contenders as the world’s greatest invention.