Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and engineer who is best known for his paintings, notably the Mona Lisa (c. 1503–19) and the Last Supper (1495–98), making him one of the most recognised Renaissance visionaries of his time and in history. Da Vinci was generally known only as a painter, as sadly little or nothing of his engineering works or sculptures have survived. His personal notebooks however, referred collectively as ‘Leonardo’s codices’ are the only known surviving evidence of his voracious curiosity and rich mind regarding science and technology. Close study of these notebooks revealed an excess of intellectual and technical accomplishments, writings and drawings, confirming that Da Vinci was an innovator and a man who clearly imagined the modern world before it was realised.
Among the thousands of pages, were the numerous subjects that Da Vinci studied, and it was here that this fascination with human mechanical flight was discovered. These investigations into the possibility of flight are littered throughout his codices and manuscript collections, but he did produce one short codex almost entirely dedicated to flight between 1505-1506, called the Codice sul volo degli uccelli (Codex on the Flight of Birds), and in totality, Da Vinci wrote over 35,000 words and created around different 500 sketches, relating to flying machines, and the nature of air and bird flight.
Da Vinci worked extensively on military technology, when working for the Milanese court, and it was here that his interest and fascination in flight began. The variety of sketches of weapons, military machines, and fortifications he created included a range of now realised engineering inventions, such as a crossbow, tank and submarine, which at the time did not exist. It was this creative research into military technology and tactics, that led him to ponder and think about the possibility and notion of a man-made flying machine.
Given that Da Vinci tended to use nature as a foundation for many of his ideas, imitating natural flight was an obvious place for him to begin, which is why many of his early aeronautical designs, which interestingly predated his serious study of bird flight, were imagined as a ‘birdlike’ machine that would generate lift and thrust by flapping wings. This was emulated in his many sketches, to which the pilot would use a flapping wing mechanism. As science has proven, although imaginative in design, the fundamental barrier of a humans limited muscle power and endurance when compared to birds, meant that Da Vinci could never have overcome this basic fact of human physiology.
Around the time he painted the Mona Lisa (1500), da Vinci’s research, concepts and ideas regarding flight outlined in his many codices, were considered much more forward thinking. Da Vinci had a much clearer understanding of the relationship between the centre of gravity and the centre of lifting pressure on a bird’s wing, the behaviour of birds as they ascend against the wind, the relationship between a curved wing section and lift, and the concept of air as a fluid, a foundation of the science of aerodynamics. He also had insightful observations regarding gliding and the way in which birds create balance using their wings and tail, just as the Wright brothers would also consider, when evolving their first aeronautical designs.
Interestingly, De Vinci also had an insight into a pilot’s position when controlling a potential flying machine, and how the pilot could control the machine by shifting their body weight, precisely as the early glider pioneers of the late 19th century would do. He mentions the importance and requirement of creating lightweight aircraft structures, and furthermore even hints at the ‘force’, that Isaac Newton would later define as gravity. It is fascinating that in just 20 pages of notes and drawings, housed in da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, that he outlined a number of insightful and modern observations germinated in the mind of da Vinci, leading him to develop a number of plausible concepts, that although were never to out knowledge realised in a practical sense, would however later find a place in the progress of successful human aeroplane flight.
Leonardo De Vinci lived a fifteenth century life, but his vision of the modern world spread before his mind’s eye and like in so many other areas of study, he continued to push the boundaries of science, technology and engineering.
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