🔗 Share this article Are You Able to Solve This? The Overlooked Dutch Invention Which Shaped the Modern World One can find many contenders for the designation as “world’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The combustion motor. According to a recent publication, however, that honor should go to a mechanised timber mill conceived through Dutch inventor Cornelis Corneliszoon during 1593. “Before automated sawing, constructing a simple merchant vessel necessitated around ten sawyers working for 90 days,” notes Jaime Dávila. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, an identical quantity of cut lumber could be manufactured in less than a week.” Owing to this speedy mechanical saw, that turned logs to planks using almost no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships faster than anyone else, an advantage that unleashed one hundred years of Netherlands maritime, financial as well as cultural dominance across the continent and the world. The First True Industrial Machine The inventor's lumber mill, contends the writer, was “humanity’s initial true industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a gear. One component converted its rotary motion to vertical motion for the cutting blade. Another component changed the spinning motion into a lateral motion advancing the timber to the blade. A ratchet system moved the log forward a measured step each cycle. “Each element was modest on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to combine these parts in order that they acted within a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting on every downward motion and moving on every return stroke. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent application of basic components.” A fact that leads us up to today’s challenge. I’d like for you to reimagine one of the basic concepts behind this historic machine. Round and Up Design a mechanism that turns circular movement into vertical action. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve into which one of the bars can slide perfectly. (Consider that you can mount components on a base, so the parts do not collapse.) The solution returns at 5pm UK featuring the solution. Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Instead, please suggest (less celebrated) contenders as the world’s greatest creation.