Leonardo da Vinci: Inventor

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.  They went out and happened to things.  
--Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) painted, of course, the Mona Lisa. He was one of the great painters of the late Italian Renaissance.  But he was also an inventor of incredible originality, often drawing up plans for devices that no one got around to implementing and trying out until centuries later.

And it is primarily his record as an inventor that is on display in a visiting exhibit now on display in Seattle's Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), which I visited today.

Leonardo kept a record of his inventions primarily in long-hand written notes, notes illustrated by his own drawings, and notes kept on whatever scraps of paper happened to be at hand at the time.  After his death, these pages were later combined into bound volumes, called codices, which are now scattered among a number of major museums.  It was pages from these codices that are on exhibit at MOHAI.  His writings were impossible for me to read.  He not only wrote in a tiny script, in 16th century Italian, but, being left handed, he wrote backward from right to left.  

As far as I could tell from observation alone, he might as well have been writing in Saxon runes.

More impressive to the non-expert visitor than his codex pages are the physical exhibits.  Modern Italian craftsmen have built the devices that da Vinci envisioned in his notes.  Many of these are interactive exhibits, where we as museum attendees are invited to turn cranks, pull levers, and in these and other ways thus put into operation the devices ourselves.

Some of his inventions seem quite basic -- screw drives, various gear combinations. But many seem unbelievably prescient -- plans for helicopters, self-driven vehicles, air-supplied diving suits, and a large number of military weapons, weapons obviously designed to interest his patrons -- a steam-driven cannon, multiple-barrel rifle combinations, devices for scaling and breaching fortress walls, even a submarine.

One exhibit is a scale model of an ideal city, one that would avoid traffic congestion, disease, and pollution.  (I wasn't particularly impressed by the result, although I was impressed by Leonardo's desire to address these issues six hundred years ago.)

Leonardo da Vinci was obviously a genius, a more multi-faceted genius than we see often in history.  His energy and initiative were legendary.  It's sad that, at the end of his life, he considered himself a failure for not having achieved more with his many talents. 

Few of us would have felt so humble.

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Photo -- Three wheel vehicle powered by turning of hand crank.