About Jaime Dávila
A native of Mexico, Jaime Dávila earned an engineering degree in the United States. Choosing a career in the creative industries, he worked primarily in broadcasting and eventually led operations at Mexico’s largest media company.
His interest in engineering and technology never left him. One of his enduring passions is the history of innovation, which has taken him around the world in search of the origins of human progress. Since retiring from corporate life, he has pursued this passion while also managing private investment activities.
He considers himself a lifelong student of history, fascinated by the ways technological, artistic, and political ideas have shaped human destiny. His main influences include Dava Sobel, Sir Kenneth Clark, Jared Diamond, and Yuval Noah Harari, as well as the sweeping historical syntheses of Will and Ariel Durant.
He enjoys delving deeply into historical events that have long captivated him. In the process he became intrigued by the creation of the first mechanised sawmill by Cornelis Corneliszoon in 1593. This invention, whose significance has been overlooked, inspired his new book.
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About the Book
What if an individual’s invention, which occurred over
four centuries ago and has long been overlooked by
history, had ushered the world as we know it?
Jaime Dávila’s Forgotten tells the story of a little-known
Dutchman, Cornelis Corneliszoon from the village of Uitgeest
north of Amsterdam, and how he built and patented
humanity’s first true industrial machine: the mechanised
sawmill (1593).
This innovation did more than cut wood faster. In the Dutch Republic of the late 16th century, it removed a critical bottleneck in shipbuilding, unleashing Dutch maritime dominance, global trade, and financial innovation. This led the Netherlands to affirm itself as a world power.
Importantly, the resilient Republic exported its institutions, enterprising ethos and significant religious tolerance to the Western World: to England when William of Orange took the English throne in 1688 following the Glorious Revolution, and to North America when New Amsterdam, later renamed New York City, became a trading outpost in 1625. To this day the Dutch respect for enterprise and individual freedoms remain woven into North America’s social fabric.
Forgotten ends by exploring some hypothetical questions:
what if the Spanish or the English or the Chinese had
invented the mechanical sawmill: would history be
different? And what if Cornelis’ seminal invention had
never happened? The answers corroborate the author’s
thesis that an apparently simple invention by a small
miller, at a specific time and in a specific place, was to
change the course of Western history.
“Before mechanised sawing, constructing a modest merchant vessel required approximately ten sawyers working for three months … with wind-powered sawmills, the same quantity of processed timber could be produced in less than a week … These advantages – speed, cost and quality – created a virtuous circle for Dutch maritime development. More affordable ships enabled greater trade volume, which then generated more capital for fleet expansion, which increased demand for ships, which stimulated further innovation in production.”
