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There are many candidates for the designation as “planet’s most significant innovation.” The wheel. The movable type. The steam engine.

As per a new book, however, that title should go to the mechanised timber mill conceived by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593.

“Before automated sawing, building a simple trading ship necessitated approximately 10 sawyers laboring for 90 days,” writes the author. “Using wind-powered lumber mills, the same quantity of processed timber could be manufactured in less than a week.”

Thanks to their speedy mechanical cutter, that turned logs into planks with almost no manual labor, Dutch builders could build ships more quickly compared to any other nation, an advantage that sparked a century of Dutch maritime, economic as well as artistic dominance in the continent and the world.

The First Genuine Manufacturing Machine

The inventor's lumber mill, argues Dávila, represented “mankind’s initial authentic industrial machine.” A windmill rotated a gear. A single part transformed the circular movement into up-and-down motion to power the saw. Another component transformed the spinning movement into a sideway’s motion advancing the timber to the cutter. A ratchet system moved the wood forward one precise increment per stroke.

“Each element was simple by itself. Corneliszoon’s brilliance was to combine them in order that the machine acted in a perfectly controlled sequence, cutting on every downward motion and moving on every return stroke. This constituted an astonishingly clever application of basic parts.”

Which leads us to the current puzzle. The task is you to reimagine a key the fundamental concepts behind Corneliszoon’s machine.

Round and Up

Construct a machine which converts circular motion to up-and-down motion. You have these items exclusively: A rotating disc. Two pins. Two rods. A “sleeve”, which is a tube or sleeve through which one of the rods will fit snugly. (Consider that it is possible to put things on a stand, so the parts do not fall down.)

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

Meanwhile, NO SPOILERS. Instead, please propose (less celebrated) candidates for the planet’s most impactful invention.