If you were to use a time machine to explore the Zaan region’s past, you wouldn’t need to look at the calendar to know in what era you arrived: you could simply follow your nose!

Is that fresh sawdust making you sneeze? Then you must be in the 17th century! Is there an unbearable stench of cod liver oil? Then you’ve gone back another century! But if all you can smell is cocoa powder and sugary biscuits, then it must be around 1900!

All these smells tell us a lot about what might have been the first− and indeed largest−industrial region in the world.

The first leaf in this history book can be credited to Cornelis Coneliszoon, a humble farmer and visionary inventor. Tinkering away in his brother-in-law’s carpentry workshop beside his father-in-law’s mill, he was the first Dutchman to design a tool that was as simple as it was brilliant: the crankshaft.

With two bends, this new device used the rotation of the windmill’s sail arms to make rods and pistons move back and forth. Attach a few saws and, hey presto, you had a mechanical sawmill: a machine that could not only saw 30 times faster −and therefore much more cheaply− than a handsaw, but also saw with greater and straighter precision.

When steam engines replaced windmills, production capacity increased even more, and the focus soon shifted to food products.

Well-known giants in the Dutch food sector that are still thriving today −companies such as Albert Heijn, Honig, Duyvis and, of course, Verkade− were all founded in the Zaan region, which quickly became the Dutch ‘pantry’.