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Sky here with another episode of the History and Plug Podcast. If you make a list of inventions that we think created the modern world, the same ones are usually in the top five positions. Gunpowder, the steam engine, blast furnaces, compasses, or the printing press. And there's a whole bunch of other contenders that have been named. Double entry bookkeeping, railroads, telegraphs, you get it. But there's another strong contender

for most important invention in the modern age that hasn't been mentioned, and that is the sawmill.

This is a pretty big omission because it basically created the Netherlands and made it a world power.

The wind-powered sawmill was invented around 1592 in the Netherlands, and it immediately transformed

the nature of labor and industry.

It replaced muscle-powered Sawyers, and who sawed timber, and allowed it to be cut for shipbuilding

construction up to 30 times faster than manual labor, which dropped the costs of wood products

to the floor. The wind-powered sawmill use a crankshaft to convert the windmill's rotating

motion into the linear,

up-and-down motion required for sawing wood. And this wasn't just a new invention. It was basically

an early, powerful assembly line factory. Timber could be processed much faster, which allowed for

easy and cheap shipbuilding, enabling the Dutch have massively expand their global fleet, build up a

trade empire, create the first joint stock expand their global fleet, build up a trade empire,

create the first joint stock companies, futures market, and really the entire system of global

finance we have today. How did this simple invention come together? How did it unlock entire technology

trees? And why haven't we thought about this today? Today's episode I'm joined by Jaime Davila,

author of forgotten how one man unlocked the modern world.

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