Are You Able to Crack This? That Forgotten Dutch Creation That Shaped the Contemporary Globe

One can find many candidates for the designation as “planet’s greatest invention.” The circular axle. The printing press. The combustion motor.

According to a new book, however, that honor belongs to the mechanised sawmill conceived through Dutch inventor Corneliszoon van Uitgeest in 1593.

“Before automated sawing, building a simple trading ship necessitated around 10 sawyers working over 90 days,” notes the author. “With wind-powered sawmills, an identical quantity of cut lumber could be produced within a week.”

Thanks to their speedy automated cutter, which converted logs to planks using almost no human effort, Dutch builders could construct vessels more quickly than anyone else, which sparked one hundred years of Dutch maritime, financial as well as cultural supremacy across Europe and the world.

The First Genuine Industrial Device

Corneliszoon’s lumber mill, contends Dávila, was “mankind’s first authentic industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a wheel. One component converted the circular motion to up-and-down motion to power the cutting blade. Another component changed that same rotary motion into a sideway’s motion advancing the log to the blade. A geared mechanism shifted the log ahead one precise increment each stroke.

“Every component seemed simple by itself. The Dutchman’s brilliance lay in how to combine these parts so they acted in a precisely synchronized sequence, cutting with each descending motion and moving with each upward motion. This constituted a remarkably clever application of fundamental components.”

A fact that leads us to today’s puzzle. I’d like you to reimagine one of the fundamental concepts underpinning this historic invention.

Circular to Vertical

Design a machine which converts rotary motion into up-and-down motion. You have these components exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pegs. Two bars. A “sleeve”, that is a cylinder or sleeve into which a single the bars will fit snugly. (Consider that you can put things on a base, so the components don’t collapse.)

The solution returns at 5pm UK time with the solution.

Meanwhile, PLEASE NO HINTS. Rather, feel free to suggest (less celebrated) contenders for the world’s greatest creation.