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One can find many candidates for the designation as “world’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The printing press. The steam engine.

As per a new book, though, that title should go to the mechanised timber mill conceived through Dutchman Corneliszoon van Uitgeest during 1593.

“Prior to mechanised cutting, building a modest merchant vessel required around ten sawyers laboring for 90 days,” writes Jaime Dávila. “With wind-driven lumber mills, an identical amount of cut lumber could be produced within a week.”

Thanks to their speedy mechanical cutter, that turned logs to planks with almost no human effort, Dutch builders were able to build vessels more quickly compared to anyone else, which unleashed one hundred years of Dutch naval, financial and cultural dominance across Europe and the world.

The First Genuine Industrial Machine

The inventor's lumber mill, contends Dávila, represented “humanity’s initial true industrial machine.” A windmill turned a gear. A single part transformed its rotary motion into vertical action to power the cutting blade. Another component transformed that same spinning movement into a lateral movement advancing the timber toward the cutter. A ratchet system shifted the wood forward a measured step per cycle.

“Every component was modest on its own. The Dutchman’s brilliance was to integrate these parts in order that the machine acted within a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting with each downward stroke and moving on every upward stroke. This constituted an astonishingly intelligent application of fundamental components.”

Which leads us to the current puzzle. The task is for you to reinvent a key the basic ideas underpinning this historic invention.

Round and Up

Design a mechanism which converts rotary movement to vertical motion. Your available these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two rods. A “sleeve”, that is a tube or sleeve through which one of the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that you can mount components on a stand, so the components do not collapse.)

I’ll be back at 5pm UK featuring the solution.

In the interim, NO SPOILERS. Instead, feel free to propose (non obvious) candidates as the planet’s greatest invention.