🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Crack This? That Overlooked Netherlands Invention Which Shaped our Contemporary World One can find numerous contenders to claim the title of “planet’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. According to a recent publication, though, that title belongs to the automated sawmill conceived through Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593. “Before automated cutting, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated around ten sawyers laboring over 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-powered sawmills, an identical quantity of processed timber could be manufactured in less than seven days.” Thanks to their speedy automated cutter, that converted logs into planks with virtually no human effort, the Dutch were able to construct ships faster compared to anyone else, an advantage that unleashed a century of Netherlands maritime, financial and cultural dominance across Europe and the world. The First True Industrial Machine The inventor's lumber mill, argues the writer, represented “mankind’s initial true factory machine.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. One component transformed the rotary movement into up-and-down motion to power the saw. Another component changed that same spinning movement into a lateral movement advancing the log toward the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the wood ahead one precise increment per cycle. “Each element seemed simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to combine these parts in order that the machine acted within a perfectly controlled order, sawing on every descending stroke while moving with each upward motion. It was a remarkably intelligent use of fundamental parts.” A fact that leads us up to the current challenge. The task is you to reimagine one of the basic concepts behind this historic machine. Round and Up Construct a machine which converts circular motion into vertical motion. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pins. Two rods. A “guide”, which is a tube or housing into which a single the rods can slide perfectly. (Assume it is possible to put things on a base, so the components do not collapse.) I’ll be back at 5pm UK with the solution. Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (non obvious) contenders for the planet’s most impactful creation.