Volume 13 , Issue 1

(1496) Leonardo Da Vinci Flying Machine

It was January 3, 1496, Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tested a flying machine he had constructed. This was way centuries before the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. But did the Wright brothers get some of their ideas from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks? Leonardo's notebooks suggested that Leonardo tested his flying machine on 3 January 1496. It did not succeed and Leonardo did not try to fly again for several years.

Leonardo da Vinci was often been described as the Italian archetype of the Renaissance man or universal genius. He was a scientist, a mathematician, an engineer, an inventor, an anatomist, a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a musician and a writer. It is primarily as a painter that Leonardo was and is renowned.

You should remember one of his works, the Mona Lisa. Was she smiling and why was she smiling? Was she the mother of Da Vinci? Who was she really? A mistress?

Another of Leonardo's works was The Last Supper. Both of these artworks occupy a unique position as the most famous, reproduced and imitated portrait and religious painting of all time.

As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptualizing a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and the double hull, and outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics.

As a scientist, Leonardo greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and Leonardo's desire to fly was expressed in many studies and drawings. His later journals contain a detailed study of the flight of birds and several different designs for wings based in structure upon those of bats which he described as being less heavy because of the impenetrable nature of the membrane.

One design that he produced showed a helicopter to be lifted by a rotor powered by four men. They say it would not have worked since the body of the craft itself would have rotated in the opposite direction to the rotor.

While Leonardo designed a number of man powered flying machines with mechanical wings that flapped, he also designed a parachute and a light hang glider which could have flown.   |  View or Add Comments (1 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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