Top 10 Leonardo da Vinci Inventions

8/7/2019 Top 10 Leonardo da Vinci Inventions

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Leonardo da Vinci may well have been the greatestinventor in history, yet he had very little effect on thetechnology of his time. Da Vinci drew sketches anddiagrams of his inventions, which he preserved in hisnotebooks, but either he lost interest in building them or was never able to convince one of his wealthy patrons

to finance construction of his designs. As a result,almost none of da Vinci's inventions were built duringhis lifetime. And, because he never published hisdiagrams, nobody else knew about them until hisnotebooks were discovered long after his death.

That's a pity, because da Vinci's designs werespectacularly ahead of his time. If they had been built, they might have revolutionized thehistory of technology, though many of them may have been impossible to build with the toolsavailable in the 15th and 16th centuries. In recent years, however, engineers have begun toconstruct models of da Vinci's amazing machines and most of them actually work. In thefollowing pages we'll look at some of the most imaginative -- and coolest -- of the designs

that da Vinci sketched out in his notebooks.

10: Ball Bearing

As an invention, the ball bearing doesn't seem all thatimpressive, but much of modern technology dependson it. Ball bearings make it possible for drive shafts torotate, for goods to roll along ramps in a factory or store, and for mechanical devices in general to

operate. By placing a smoothly rolling sphere betweenmoving surfaces, ball bearings eliminate friction. Theidea can be traced back to the Roman Empire, butmany historians believe that da Vinci's notebookscontain the first practical designs. Many of the devicesthat he conceived depend on them and wouldn't haveoperated without them. Of course, as with many of daVinci's ideas, the concept was never made widelyknown and the ball bearing had to be reinvented by someone else.


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9: Parachute

The speed at which a body falls depends on twofactors: the force of the gravity pulling it downwardand the resistance of the atmosphere through which it

is falling. If there were no atmosphere, a falling bodywould simply accelerate to higher and higher speedsuntil it hit a surface, but air tends to slow it down untilit reaches its so-called terminal velocity. Differentobjects have different terminal velocities. The terminalvelocity of a human being falling through the earth'satmosphere -- a skydiver with an unopened chute, for instance -- is about 120 mph (193.1 kilometers per hour). That's surprisingly slow, but still fast enoughthat a person falling from an airplane would make apretty big splat upon hitting the ground. The idea of aparachute is to reduce a person's terminal velocity

and make a long fall survivable.

Da Vinci, who was fascinated by the idea of human flight, conceived his parachute as a wayfor people to drift gracefully through the air. Its pyramid-shaped framework was draped withcloth. As da Vinci wrote in his notebooks, it would allow a man "to throw himself down fromany great height without suffering any injury." Twenty-first century attempts to build thedesign suggest that it would have worked pretty much as da Vinci described.

8: Ornithopter

Da Vinci was fascinated by birds. He watched them,sketched them and borrowed ideas from them for hisinventions. One of the results of this fascination wasthe ornithopter, a device conceived by da Vinci thatwould theoretically have allowed humans to soar through the air like birds. While da Vinci's parachutewould have allowed a human being to jump off a cliff without being hurt, the ornithopter was actually a wayfor people to soar off the ground and into the air.

On paper, the ornithopter looks much more birdlike(or batlike) than present-day airplanes. Its wings aredesigned to flap as the pilot turns a crank. Thisinvention demonstrates da Vinci's strong grasp of aerodynamics and modern attempts to reproduce the ornithopter show that it could indeedhave flown -- that is, if it were already in the air. Taking off under the weak propulsionsupplied by human muscles would have been much trickier.

The parachute and ornithopter were only two of the flying machines concocted by da Vinci inhis notebooks. Others include a glider and his helicopter-like aerial screw.


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7: Machine Gun

Da Vinci's machine gun, or "33-barrelled organ," wasn'ta machine gun in the modern sense. It couldn't firemultiple bullets rapidly out of a single barrel. It could,

however, deliver punishing volleys of gunfire at rapidintervals and, if it had been built, would have effectivelymowed-down oncoming infantry.

The mechanism behind the machine gun is simple. DaVinci proposed mounting 11 muskets side by side on arectangular board, then attaching three such boardstogether in a triangular arrangement. By placing ashaft down the middle, the entire contraption could berotated, so that one set of 11 guns could be fired whilea second set cooled off and a third set was beingreloaded. Then the entire mechanism could be rotated

to bring the loaded set to the top where it could befired again.

Though da Vinci noted time and again in his notebooks that he hated war and loathed theidea of creating killing machines like this one, he needed money to support his householdand found it easy to convince his wealthy patrons that such machines would help themtriumph over their enemies. Perhaps it was for the best that none of da Vinci's war machinesever actually got built.

6: Diving SuitWhile living in Venice in the late 15th century, da Vincidevised a far-fetched idea for repelling invading ships:Send men to the bottom of the harbor in diving suitsand let them cut holes in enemy hulls. Well, maybe thatdoesn't sound so far-fetched any more. It's fairlycommon now for frogmen with scuba gear to engage inunderwater sabotage. In da Vinci's time, however, theidea was unheard of. Da Vinci's divers would havecarried breathing hoses connected to a floating bell fullof air, wearing facemasks with glass goggles that wouldhelp them see underwater. In another version of theconcept, the divers would have breathed from winebladders filled with air. In both versions, the men wouldcarry a bottle to urinate in so that they could stayunderwater indefinitely. Da Vinci's design was not onlyfeasible -- it was practical!

These diving suits might actually have been constructed, except that the invaders they wereintended to repel were driven away by the Venetian navy before underwater sabotagebecame necessary.


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5: Armored Tank

While working for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, daVinci proposed what may have been his ultimate war machine: the armored tank. Driven by the muscle

power of eight men, the armored tank was aturtle-like moving shell with 36 guns poking out of itssides. It was operated by a system of gears propelledby cranks that turned a sequence of wheels. Theeight men would have been protected by the outer shell so that they could have driven the tank at aboutwalking speed right into the heat of battle withoutbeing hurt. The guns, firing in all directions, wouldhave been devastating to enemy ranks.

The diagram of the armored tank in da Vinci'snotebooks contains a curious flaw: the gearing

causes the front wheels to move in the oppositedirection from the rear wheels. If built as shown, the tank would have been unable to move.Da Vinci was far too smart to make an error that trivial by accident, so historians haveproposed a number of reasons why da Vinci would have made it deliberately. Maybe hedidn't really want the war machine to be built. Or maybe he was afraid that his diagramwould fall into enemy hands, so he made the error to assure that nobody else could buildthe tank but him.

4: Self-Propelled Cart

Da Vinci's self-propelled cart can be looked at ashistory's first car. In fact, because it has no driver, itcan be looked at as history's first robot vehicle, too.

The drawings that da Vinci made of the car in hisnotebooks don't fully reveal the mechanism inside andmodern engineers have had to guess at what made itgo. The best guess is that it used a spring-drivenmechanism similar to that in a clock. The"mainsprings" are contained inside drum-shapedcasings and can be wound up by hand. As the springsuncoil, the cart is driven forward like a wind-up toy.The steering can be programmed through a series of blocks set among the gears, though the fact that thecart could only make right turns would have limited its usability.

Leonardo apparently considered his cart to be something of a toy, but it's not hard toimagine that, had it actually been built, useful applications would have shortly followed.


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3: City of the Future

When Leonardo was living in Milan around the year 1400, the Black Plague devastated Europe. Citiessuffered far more than the countryside and da Vinci

theorized that something about cities made themespecially vulnerable to disease. This idea issurprisingly modern, given that the germ theory of disease didn't become well established until the early20th century. Da Vinci was inspired to draw out plansfor one of his most ambitious inventions: A plannedcity, designed from the ground up to be sanitary andlivable.

The result was a triumph of urban planning that unfortunately was never built. Da Vinci's"ideal city" was divided into several levels, with everything thought to be unsanitary kept onthe lowest level, and a network of canals available for rapid waste disposal. Water would

have been distributed through buildings using a hydraulic system that prefigured modernplumbing. The resources needed to build such a city were well beyond da Vinci's means, of course, and he never found a patron willing to foot the bill for constructing it.

2: Aerial Screw

If nothing else, da Vinci's aerial screw is arguably oneof the coolest designs that he ever sketched in hisnotebooks. Working much like a modern helicopter,

this flying machine looks a lot like a giant whirlingpinwheel. The "blades" of this helicopter were to havebeen made out of linen. When turned fast enough, theywere intended to produce lift, the aeronauticalphenomenon that makes airplanes and helicopters fly.Air pressure would have built up under each blade,forcing the flying machine into the sky.

At least that was the idea, anyway. Would the aerialscrew actually have worked in practice? Probably not.And that's a pity -- it would have looked amazing inflight.


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1: Robotic Knight

If da Vinci's self-propelled cart was the first workingdesign for a robotic vehicle, then the robotic knightwould have been the first humanoid robot, a real 15th

century C-3PO. Da Vinci was fascinated by humananatomy and spent long hours dissecting corpses inorder to figure out how the human body worked. Thisgave him an understanding of how muscles propelledbone. He reasoned that these same principles could beapplied to a machine. Unlike most of da Vinci'sinventions, Leonard apparently actually built the roboticknight, though it was used primarily for entertainmentat parties thrown by his wealthy patron LodovicoSforza.

Da Vinci's robot has not survived and no one knows exactly what it was capable of doing,

but apparently it could walk, sit down and even work its jaw. It was driven by a system of pulleys and gears. In 2002, robotics expert Mark Rosheim used da Vinci's notes to build aworking model of da Vinci's robotic knight and some of the concepts behind it havesubsequently been used by Rosheim for the design of planetary exploration robots to beused by NASA. So after half a century of space exploration, da Vinci's designs have finallymade it into outer space.

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Top 10 Leonardo da Vinci Inventions