Can You Crack This? That Forgotten Netherlands Invention Which Forged the Contemporary World

There are numerous candidates for the designation as “world’s most significant invention.” The wheel. The movable type. The combustion motor.

According to a new book, though, that honor belongs to a automated timber mill conceived through Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593.

“Before mechanised sawing, building a modest trading ship required around ten sawyers laboring for three months,” notes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-driven sawmills, the same amount of processed timber could be produced in less than a week.”

Owing to this rapid automated saw, that converted logs to boards using virtually no manual labor, the Dutch were able to construct ships more quickly than any other nation, an advantage that sparked one hundred years of Dutch naval, economic and artistic dominance in the continent and the globe.

The Original True Manufacturing Machine

The inventor's sawmill, contends the writer, was “mankind’s initial true industrial apparatus.” A wind turbine rotated a gear. A single part transformed its circular movement into up-and-down action to power the cutting blade. A separate mechanism changed the spinning motion into a sideway’s movement feeding the timber toward the blade. A geared mechanism moved the log ahead a measured step per stroke.

“Each element seemed modest by itself. The Dutchman’s genius lay in how to integrate these parts so they acted within a precisely synchronized order, cutting on every descending stroke while moving with each upward stroke. It was an astonishingly intelligent use of fundamental parts.”

A fact that leads us to the current puzzle. The task is you to reinvent one of the basic ideas behind this historic invention.

Circular to Vertical

Design a machine which converts rotary motion to up-and-down motion. You have these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a cylinder or sleeve into which a single the bars can slide snugly. (Consider that you can put things on a stand, so that the parts do not collapse.)

The solution returns at 5pm UK with the solution.

Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Rather, feel free to suggest (non obvious) candidates for the world’s greatest creation.