How it began
Cornelis Corneliszoon, a windmill owner from the village of Uitgeest in Holland born about 1550, was experimenting with wind-driven sawing by 1592. He was granted letters patent on December 15, 1593, and built his first sawmill in 1594. It was a small mill on a raft, known as Het Juffertje. On December 6, 1597, he received a further ten-year patent for an improved crankshaft. He died shortly before 1607.
Before it existed
Until then logs were sawn into planks and beams by hand, a difficult and time-consuming job. According to the Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest Foundation, hand sawyers needed about 120 working days to cut 60 beams or trunks. Shipyards and builders depended on this slow supply, and around 1600 shipwrights in the Zaan district were not yet able to build a large ship.
How it works
A windmill produces rotation, while a saw needs to move back and forth. Corneliszoon used a crankshaft to convert the circular motion of the mill's shaft into an up-and-down motion that drove a frame of saw blades through the log. The crankshaft patented in 1597 had three cranks set at 120 degrees to one another.
How it spread
The first mill was moved to Zaandam in 1596. Between 1614 and 1618 eight new sawmills were built in the Zaan district, and by 1630 there were 53 there, out of 83 north of Amsterdam. The number peaked in 1731, with 450 sawmills, 256 of them in the Zaan district. An advanced form of the mill, the paltrok, played a key part in the economic success of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.
Who pushed back
Hand sawyers objected to the development of industrial sawing, which threatened their trade. The Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest Foundation records their opposition and notes that the Hand Sawyers' Guild of Amsterdam was abolished in 1627, by which time dozens of wind-powered sawmills were at work north of the city and the number in the Zaan district was rising quickly.
What lasted
The foundation states that production rose by about 3,000 percent, with a mill cutting in four or five days what had taken 120. Cheap sawn timber caused enormous growth in shipbuilding: 306 ships were under construction in the Zaan district in 1708. The mills supplied the merchant fleet and navy of the Dutch Golden Age and made the Zaan district what the foundation calls Europe's first industrial area.
