Leonardo da Vinci - The Man Who Wanted To Know Everything

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest genius’s that’s ever lived, also known as the first modern mind. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

500 years ago he set out to try and find out all that there was to learn. “I would do things no one in the past has dared to do, I would think new thoughts, bring new things into being”. He created works of astonishing beauty such including the Mon Elisa, the most famous painting in the world and The Last Supper made him known today as the Renaissance visionary who saw the modern world before it was realized. At the same time he designed terrifying machines, which spewed death and destruction. He designed ways of getting man to the bottom of the sea, He invented flying machines 400 years before man took to the skies.

Leonardo was born on April 15 1452, in Tuscan hill town just outside the village of Vinci in Italy. He was born illegitimate and this was to shape his life. Being a bastard he was barred from learning Greek and Latin, the languages all books where written in. This in turn gave him an advantage. Leonardo had no use for the Greeks and the romans this being as a result of him being poorly educated in their culture and philosophies. He said, “It is only by observation the we can find out the truth” which the Greeks and the romans didn’t agree to as they felt their formulation’s, which was sometimes wrong, was right.

Due to Leonardo’s lack of formal education, he wrote left-handed and rather mysteriously backwards which would later help him protect his work in the future. Leonardo grew up exploring the countryside around Vinci, he was very curious about the natural world, examining it, studying it. He became obsessed with the movement of water, the cycles of growth in plants, the behavior of living creatures and most of all the wonder of flight.

“It comes to me almost like a dream, the very first recollection of my infancy. I was in my cradle and a great hawk flew down to me, it opened my mouth with its tail and its feathers struck me several times inside my lips.” Leonardo’s dreams suggest he had a strong empathy for birds. Throughout his life he watched and obsessively drew birds in flight, threw that he began to establish the principles of aerodynamics. His obsession with birds led to one his greatest obsessions of his life, which was to make a machine that would enable man to fly.

Leonardo put all or most of his ideas on paper, which enable to be able to know what was in his head. He left behind 6000 pages of drawings and notes, some of which have been collected into notebooks. The Queens library at Windsor castle is home to the world’s largest collection of Leonardo’s sketches and writings. Amongst pictures of cats, plants and a variety of anatomical drawings, there are drawings with descriptions of all sorts of wonderful machines.

Sometime in 1460 Leonardo’s dad took him out of Vinci to Florence as a young boy to find work, which at the time was a fast construction site, a hot house of talent. It was one of the largest cities in Europe, the center of the civilized world. His father had hoped for him to become an artist because being an illegitimate meant he could not become a doctor or lawyer. So his father got him an internship with Florence’s leading crafts man and sculptor of that period.

His internship there lasted several years before he found himself involved in sex scandal, one which would threatened his life. Leonardo was publicly known to be bisexual, he was obsessed by the male nude and enjoyed the company of young men. Florence was in fact infamous for its homosexual culture, but it was strictly speaking illegal and any one found guilty was sentenced to death. In April 1476 Leonardo was accused of sodomy anonymous, he was tried but luckily found not guilty and only got away with a slight beating.

Of the various subjects that Leonardo studied, human mechanical flight was the one he was more fascinated with. He drew about 500 sketches and 35,000 words dealing with flying machines, bird flight and the nature of air.

Leonardo’s interest in flight appears to have stemmed from his extensive work on military technology, which he performed in the employ of the Milanese court. He filled many notebooks with countless sketches of weapons, military machines, and fortifications. They included a giant crossbow, a tank, and a submarine, to name just a few. However, as far as it is known, none of these inventions were ever built. Leonardo’s focus on military technology and tactics lead him to the idea of aerial reconnaissance. Once engaged with the notion of a flying machine, it became an obsession.

Given his close observance and use of nature as a foundation for many of his ideas, emulating natural flight was an obvious place to begin. Most of Leonardo’s aeronautical designs were ornithopters machines that employed flapping wings to generate both lift and propulsion. He sketched such flying machines with the pilot prone, standing vertically, using arms, using legs. He drew detailed sketches of flapping wing mechanisms and means for actuating them. Imaginative as these designs were, the fundamental barrier to an ornithopter is the demonstrably limited muscle power and endurance of humans compared to birds. Leonardo could never have overcome this basic fact of human physiology.

Interestingly, most of these avian mimicking designs predated Leonardo’s serious study of bird flight, which we find in the Codex on the Flight of Birds, begun in 1505. In this work, compiled during the same period as the Mona Lisa was painted, we see some of the ideas and observations by Leonardo about flight that were more forward looking than his better known earlier ornithopter drawings. In the Codex, da Vinci discusses the crucial concept of the relationship between the center of gravity and the center of lifting pressure on a bird’s wing. He explains the behavior of birds as they ascend against the wind, foreshadowing the modern concept of a stall. He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the relationship between a curved wing section and lift. He grasps the concept of air as a fluid, a foundation of the science of aerodynamics. Leonardo makes insightful observations of gliding flight by birds and the way in which they balance themselves with their wings and tail, just as the Wright brothers would do as they evolved their first aeronautical designs. He comments on the pilot’s position in a potential flying machine and how control could be achieved by shifting the body weight, precisely as the early glider pioneers of the late nineteenth century would do. He notes the importance of lightweight structures that aircraft would require. He even hints at the force Newton would later define as gravity.

In less than 20 pages of notes and drawings, the Codex on the Flight of Birds outlines a number of observations and beginning concepts that would find a place in the development of a successful airplane in the early twentieth century. Leonardo never abandoned his preoccupation with flapping wing designs, and did not develop the insights he recorded in the Codex on the Flight of Birds in any practical way. Nonetheless, centuries before any real progress toward a practical flying machine was achieved, the seeds of the ideas that would lead to humans spreading their wings germinated in the mind of da Vinci. In aeronautics, as with so many of the subjects he studied, he strode where no one had before. Leonardo lived a fifteenth century life, but a vision of the modern world spread before his mind’s eye.

Citation
(Anne Millbrooke, Aviation history 1999,2000,2006)
(Biography.com, Leonardo da Vinci, http://www.biography.com/people/leonardo-da-vinci-40396.)
(history Channel, Leonado da vinci, 2013, A&E Television Networks http://www.history.com/topics/leonardo-da-vinci )