by Shana Priwer
Some of Leonardo's designs for watercraft weren't even meant for people. He knew that Italy was industrializing, and a major side effect was that goods had to be transported. He made some sketches showing a float for transporting building materials down a river. A dropped bottom provided space for either passengers or military personnel. Another revolutionary design was for a partial submarine, or semisubmersible. Though it was intended for battle, only a couple of people could fit inside it. Like modern submarines, it did have a tower leading to the surface, but the similarity ended there.
Leonardo was definitely a proponent of “think big!” One of his largest boat designs was for a war ship that served as a battering ram. Leonardo's drawings show an oversized rotating scythe, operated by a gear-based mechanism that raised and lowered it. Leonardo's attention to detail is evident in this design, which also includes shields for the oarsmen. Modern-day descendents from these battleships were built in the mid-nineteenth century, including the ironclad giants such as the USS Monitor. This type of warship is largely obsolete now due to the emergence of more flexibly designed aircraft carriers.
66
Around and around we go
The wheel is perhaps the undisputed champion of inventions. It has influenced virtually every part of civilization, from politics and government, to housing and recreation. Wheels are used in almost all forms of transportation: cars, trains, airplanes, and anything else that needs to move along a firm surface. Imagine a modern commute without bicycles, cars, and buses. Wheels are central to manufacturing and mass production, and most of us couldn't earn a living without them.
Leonardo da Vinci used wheels in many of his designs. He was interested in ways to increase efficiency and safety by automating mechanical tasks. Automation allows people to do more of what people are good at—philosophy, art, and other creative activities machines just can't do. Using machines to make life easier interested Leonardo, and he included the wheel as a foundation in many of his designs. Lots of Leonardo's machines used the wheel-and-axle concept. When wheels were fixed to an axle, turning one wheel meant that a second wheel would also turn. Leonardo was also interested in reducing the effort it took to turn something—while a large force was necessary to turn the wheel, it resulted in a much smaller force required to turn the smaller axle. So by using only a small force near the axle, a larger motion could be created in the wheel itself. Mechanical details like these show that Leonardo was not only interested in how machines worked, he also wanted them to work as easily as possible for their human operators. How considerate of him!
Pulleys were also important to Leonardo's designs. At its simplest, a pulley is just a wheel with a cable going over it, and two weights at the ends of the cable. Moving one weight down makes the second weight on the other side of the pulley rise. You can even connect pulleys into teams, making it possible to use less force when lifting heavy objects.
Leonardo also used gears in most of his machine sketches. First developed by the ancient Greeks, a gear is a toothed wheel that is placed next to other gears. When the first gear turns, its motion, and the force that goes with it, is transferred to the second gear. This setup is useful because it lets smaller gears use larger forces. You can also put gears at ninety-degree angles to each other. Leonardo's design for an adding machine (see number 53), for example, contained an elaborate system of gears and cranks. Historians aren't exactly sure how this machine would have worked, but they think users could have done either calculations or ratios. Toothed gears, though, were essential to the design.
Leonardo used the wheel in other types of devices, such as an odometer. Much simpler than the odometer in your car, Leonardo's idea was just to measure distance. This design was interesting because it had a handle, almost like an old-fashioned lawnmower, that you could hold while you walked. As the wheel turned, it turned a sprocket, making one stone fall into a basket every time the wheel went around once. You could then figure out how far you had gone just by counting the stones! Perhaps this system was a bit more complicated than looking at the digital display on your car, but it probably would have worked quite well.
Leonardo came up with many other inventions that used wheels, including precursors to the automobile and bicycle. More information on these inventions is in number 67.
67
Gone with the Schwinn
While Leonardo sometimes designed machines that had no practical use, others were actually quite functional. He sketched mechanical assemblies with no direct purpose, but also worked on inventions with immediate human application. If you were to go to Leonardo's showroom today, you'd find items such as a bicycle, an automobile, and a mechanical loom!
Out of all his sketches, Leonardo's bicycles were some of his most advanced. The most famous of these, found during a restoration of the “Codex Atlanticus,” shows a device with two wheels connected by a chain, plus a seat and handlebars. It probably would have been made of wood, including the wheels. It looks eerily like a modern bicycle, although its rigid frame would have made it very hard to steer! Just to give you a sense of how far ahead of the pack Leonardo really was, he designed this sketch in 1493 and the next official bicycle design didn't come until the 1860s!
Don't get too excited, though: There are some questions about the authenticity of Leonardo's bicycle sketches. The sketch had never been seen before its discovery in the 1960s, and some historians think that, based on the ink type, drawing style, and extreme similarity to modern cycles, monks in possession of Leonardo's notebooks may have added it. Of course, it's still possible that the drawing was just stuck in between the pages of the notebook for centuries.
While Leonardo designed several horse-drawn carriages, he also leapt into the future with sketches for a spring-driven vehicle, which could have been the forebearer of the modern automobile! One of Leonardo's drawings shows self-propelling vehicles that used a wheeled platform and coiled springs attached to gears, which the user had to wind. This design is actually similar to those of early automobiles in which drivers had to manually crank the car. The winding only took care of half the problem, though, since the driver also had to steer. Do you know anyone coordinated enough to sit, steer, stand, and wind at the same time? We can breathe a collective sigh of relief that Henry Ford didn't steal Leonardo's design.
In addition to the bicycle, Leonardo drew several mechanical looms around 1495. This weaving machine, very intricately detailed, was intended to be completely automatic. You can tell from his design that Leonardo paid a lot of attention to how traditional weavers performed operations by hand. He actually devised gears and other machinery to achieve the same results, combining different actions into one that could be controlled by a single crankshaft.
Leonardo went all out on this design, considering it one of the most important of the day. In a not-so-rare glimpse of hubris, Leonardo mentioned in his notebooks that he thought the loom rivaled the recent ability to print using movable type. The National Museum of Science and Technology (in Milan, Italy) seems to agree; they built a full-scale reconstruction and found that it worked perfectly. While Leonardo did not supply dimensions in his original drawings, the museum staff determined the size of the machine, working backwards based on the dimensions of a finished piece of cloth. Like so many of his designs, it's truly a shame that his loom was never built during the Renaissance—imagine how the course of history, or at least fashion, might have changed!
68
A coach fit for a king
Besides his designs for the bicycle and automobile, Leonardo created drawings of other vehicles. As engineers rose to the challenge of making more advanced war machines, Leonardo also contributed significantly to this effort. Leonardo designed new weapons and entirely new weapons systems (see number 56) and also came up with ideas for many different land vehicles. Some of his ideas were quite practical, while others appear more inventive, like modern automotive “concept cars” that are cool to look at, but would never be practical on the highway.
One of his largest vehicular designs was for an armored tank. The idea behind the armored car was simple: Protect passengers while causing as much damage as possible. Leonardo didn't specify the powering mechanism, and his notes indicate that his tank could have been either hand-cranked (as with his automobile design) or drawn by horses. If hand powered, the cranks would have been connected to gears, which, in turn, connected to the main driving wheels. Clad in metal panels, like today's tanks, it would have had holes for guns to poke through. In the drawing, it looks like a combination of a turtle and an alien spaceship. Do you think this vehicle would have struck awe, or just confusion, in the enemy?
Leonardo also designed vehicles for civilian usage. As architectural technology developed, the construction trade had to keep up. Lifting heavy materials to increasing heights was a well-documented problem throughout the Medieval period (just think about all those cathedrals!), and Leonardo came up with several ideas to remedy the situation. He sketched a number of designs for cranes that could be used for quarrying. The crane would lift a stone block out of the ground, and then a mechanism would automatically release once the load was removed from the quarry pit. Leonardo also drew three-dimensional designs for cranes that pivoted on a platform, which would have been useful for constructing tall buildings. While there don't appear to have been any crane models built during Leonardo's lifetime, later engineers have built them from his specifications and found them to be nearly flawless.
Part 4
WRITING, DRAWING, AND MUSIC
While painting and sculpture were Leonardo's primary focus, he was practically Shakespearean in the volume of written work he left behind. His notebooks contain thousands of pages of writing and drawing, and like a photographer uses film, Leonardo used his notebooks to capture both fact and intent. He documented scientific experiments and casual thoughts on art and science, using both text and accompanying illustrations. On more than one occasion, Leonardo strove for fame (if not fortune) by organizing his thoughts for future publication. With the exception of A Treatise on Painting, however, little of his writing was published until modern times. His notes were willed to his student and companion Francesco Melzi, but their importance was not recognized after Melzi's death. The thousands of pages were already dispersed, and many lost altogether. What remains of Leonardo's writings and drawings has been gathered together into various “codices” over the years.
In addition to his writings and sketches, Leonardo produced many drawings, as we've seen. Some were studies for eventual paintings, while others were portraits or self-portraits. In addition to his artistic works, he composed fables and short stories probably meant to amuse royal courts. He was also an excellent musician, improving on the design of a number of instruments of the day. He played a variety of instruments and was known to sing well. Leonardo was practically a one-man Renaissance halftime show! If nothing else, he was certainly, in every sense of the phrase, a Renaissance man.
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The Leonardo diaries
Notes were Leonardo's method of choice for recording his observations about the world around him. He began this habit when he was about thirty-seven and continued it for the rest of his life. They didn't have spiral binding in the Renaissance, nor could Leonardo hit up the local art supply store for a diary. Instead, he composed on loose pieces of paper of varying sizes. You can imagine Leonardo jotting down his latest inspirations on whatever pieces of scrap paper he had lying around—the Renaissance equivalent of cocktail napkins and envelope backs, perhaps? These notes reflect Leonardo's own spirit: Instead of being an orderly succession of thoughts, they appear more like an unedited outpouring of Leonardo's brilliance.
And that was fine—no one else had to read his private records, or so Leonardo intended. They were practically written in a new language, anyway. As mentioned previously, Leonardo wrote in Italian, but he wrote backwards, from right to left (perhaps because he was left-handed) and in a mirror fashion, where all the letters were backwards as well. He also invented his own shorthand, abbreviating and combining words, or in some cases dividing one word into two. And just to make matters more difficult, Leonardo also abstained from punctuation!
Due to the scattered nature of Leonardo's notes, individual pages of Leonardo's notes may deal with a diversity of topics. For example, a page that begins with an astronomical study of the motion of the earth can end with a discussion of the mixing of colors to create different shades (i.e., red + yellow = orange). Similarly, a page on the structure of the human intestines might finish as a discussion of the relationships between art and poetry. Even pages that consider one main topic are often covered with sketches or doodles of unrelated subjects.
Fortunately Leonardo's observations are mostly self-contained on a single page of his notes. Leonardo was careful to note if they continued to the back of the page or to a different page altogether. Aside from this care in continuation, however, there is almost no overall order or numbering to the pages—few are even dated or numbered at all.
Selections from Leonardo's first published work, A Treatise on Painting, appeared in a 1651 volume put out by a French publisher, and the work became extremely popular. Reprinted in six different languages, it would have definitely been on the Renaissance best-sellers list, if there were such a thing. However, this book wasn't actually based on Leonardo's original notes, but on copies that only had a few small parts of the original. The published versions didn't even use Leonardo's original order or try to combine ideas logically.
The next significant development with Leonardo's published works occurred in 1880, when a Da Vinci specialist named Jean Paul Richter, who was inspecting a Leonardo manuscript from a private collection, discovered a large fragment of the text from A Treatise on Painting in its original form. What a find! Richter continued his scavenger hunt throughout Europe, eventually discovering many parts of the work. Richter was able to create a new version that was very close to resembling Leonardo's actual intentions. This “new” treatise includes many drawings and sketches to illustrate various points, and discusses perspective, light and shadow, color theory, the proportions of the human figure, as well as botany and landscape painting.
In addition to his notes on painting (the best developed of his notes and clearly destined for publication) Leonardo also wrote about other artistic topics. For instance, Leonardo jotted down his thoughts on sculpture, with particular emphasis on his great, unrealized work, the Sforza horse (see number 29). The discussions of sculpture also include detailed notes on heating and working with metal and alloys at various temperatures. Wouldn't it be great if every genius documented her thoughts so completely?
70
Every binder needs a few dividers
Leonardo's most formalized notebooks comprise A Treatise on Painting, but what about the other thousands of pages he wrote? They cover a wide range of subjects, including architecture, anatomy, zoology, physiology, astronomy, time, water, boating, musical instruments, fables, and stories. Leonardo may even have intended to turn his observations on various subjects, especially those sections on architecture, astronomy, and water, into entire books. Leonardo was, in many ways, a walking encyclopedia.
His notes range from almost boring, to completely out of this world. While some comments were pretty abstract, he also made useful suggestions. In one of his more practical moments, Leonardo notes any room or building that serves as a dance hall should be located on the ground floor, so as to avoid the danger of dancers stomping their way through the floor. Other portions of Leonardo's notebooks reveal his fascination with the process of conception—from a medical standpoint—and the layout of a fetus in the womb. He didn't stop there, though, and continued to chronicle the lives of people from infancy into the teenage years.
Leonardo's notes also contain pithy philosophical statements and maxims on such topics as religion, morality, science, mechanics, politics, speculation, spirits, and nature. His writings include a number of mathematical tricks
and rebuses. In addition, he constructed a number of short fables, mostly featuring animals. He also wrote a variety of jokes and other amusing stories, such as this one:
“It was asked of a painter why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.” (from The Complete Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, translated by Jean Paul Richter)
The majority of the text (without any pictures) of Leonardo's notebooks is available free online from Project Gutenberg. You can view or download the text from here: www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8ldvcl0.txt
71
And the lucky winner is …
Upon his death, Leonardo probably wanted to leave his notebooks to a close personal ally, someone who would never sell them or lose them in the basement. And whom did Leonardo trust with this weighty responsibility? None other than his pupil and close friend Francesco Melzi. Leonardo's last will and testament reads, in part:
“The aforesaid Testator gives and bequeaths to Messer Francesco da Melzo, nobleman, of Milan, in remuneration for services and favours done to him in the past, each and all of the books the Testator is at present possessed of, and the instruments and portraits appertaining to his art and calling as a painter.” from www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/7ldvc09.txt)