🔗 Share this article Can You Solve It? That Forgotten Netherlands Creation That Shaped the Contemporary Globe One can find many contenders to claim the designation as “planet’s most significant innovation.” The circular axle. The printing press. The combustion motor. According to a recent publication, however, that title belongs to a automated timber mill invented through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593. “Prior to mechanised sawing, building a simple merchant vessel required approximately 10 sawyers laboring for 90 days,” notes the author. “Using wind-driven sawmills, an identical amount of cut lumber could be manufactured within seven days.” Owing to their rapid mechanical saw, that converted logs into planks using virtually no manual labor, Dutch builders could build vessels more quickly than any other nation, which sparked a century of Dutch naval, financial as well as cultural dominance across the continent and the globe. The First Genuine Industrial Machine Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends the writer, was “humanity’s initial true factory apparatus.” A windmill turned a wheel. One component converted its rotary movement into vertical action to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed that same rotary movement into a lateral movement feeding the timber toward the cutter. A geared mechanism shifted the log forward a measured step each stroke. “Every component seemed simple on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to integrate these parts in order that the machine operated within a perfectly controlled order, cutting with each downward stroke while advancing with each return motion. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent use of fundamental components.” A fact that leads us up to the current challenge. The task is for you to reimagine one of the basic ideas underpinning Corneliszoon’s machine. Round and Up Construct a mechanism which converts circular movement to vertical action. You have these items only: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or housing into which a single the bars can slide snugly. (Assume you can put things on a stand, so the components don’t fall down.) The solution returns later today UK featuring the answer. In the interim, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) candidates as the world’s greatest creation.