🔗 Share this article Can You Crack This? That Forgotten Netherlands Invention Which Shaped our Contemporary World There are many candidates to claim the title of “planet’s greatest innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine. According to a recent publication, however, that honor belongs to a mechanised timber mill invented by Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593. “Prior to mechanised sawing, building a simple merchant vessel necessitated around ten lumberjacks working over three months,” writes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-driven lumber mills, the same quantity of cut lumber might be manufactured within seven days.” Owing to this speedy mechanical cutter, that turned timber to boards using almost no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships faster compared to anyone else, an advantage that unleashed a century of Dutch maritime, financial as well as artistic supremacy across Europe and the globe. The First Genuine Manufacturing Machine The inventor's sawmill, argues Dávila, was “humanity’s first true factory machine.” A windmill turned a gear. A single part converted its rotary motion to up-and-down motion to power the cutting blade. Another component changed that same rotary motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the log toward the blade. A geared mechanism moved the log ahead one precise increment per cycle. “Every component was modest by itself. Corneliszoon’s genius lay in how to integrate these parts in order that they acted within a perfectly controlled order, sawing on every descending stroke and moving with each return stroke. It was an astonishingly intelligent application of basic components.” A fact that leads us up to the current challenge. The task is for you to reinvent one of the basic concepts behind this historic invention. Circular to Vertical Design a mechanism that turns rotary motion into vertical motion. You have these components exclusively: A spinning wheel. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or housing into which a single the rods will fit perfectly. (Assume you can put things on a base, so that the parts do not fall down.) The solution returns later today UK time featuring the answer. In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to propose (non obvious) candidates for the world’s greatest creation.