Who was Leonardo da Vinci?
∙He had a keen eye and quick mind that led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas.
∙He was a gentle vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly
weapons.
∙He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings.
Leonardo:Right to Left
Leonardo wrote in Italian using a special kind of shorthand that he invented himself. People who study his notebooks have long been puzzled by something else, however. He usually used "mirror writing", starting at the right side of the page and moving to the left. Only when he was writing something intended for other people did he write in the normal
direction.
Here is a sample of
Leonardo's writing
as it appears in
his drawings.
This is how it
would look
reversed by a
mirror.
People who were contemporaries of Leonardo left records that they saw him write and paint left handed. He also made sketches showing his own left hand at work. Being a lefty was highly unusual in Leonardo's time. Because
pulleyspeople were superstitious, children who naturally started using their left hands to write and draw were forced to use their right hands.
No one knows the true reason Leonardo used mirror writing, though several possibilities have been suggested:
∙He was trying to make it harder for people to read his notes and steal his ideas.
∙He was hiding his scientific ideas from the powerful Roman Catholic Church, whose teachings sometimes disagreed with what Leonardo
observed.
∙Writing left handed from left to right was messy because the ink just put down would smear as his hand moved across it. Leonardo chose to write in reverse because it prevented smudging.
Why do you think Leonardo wrote in reverse?
Top 10 Leonardo da Vinci Inventions Start the Countdown
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Circa 1510, Italian artist, architect, engineer and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519).
Leonardo da Vinci may well have been the greatest inventor in history, yet he had very little effect on the technology of his time. Da Vinci drew sketches and diagrams of his inventions, which he preserved in his notebooks, but either he lost interest in building them or was never able to convince one of his w
ealthy patrons to finance construction of his designs. As a result, almost none of da Vinci's inventions were built during his lifetime. And, because he never published his diagrams, nobody else knew about them until his notebooks were discovered long after his death.
That's a pity, because da Vinci's designs were spectacularly ahead of his time. If they had been built, they might have revolutionized the history of technology, though many of them may have been impossible to build with the tools available in the 15th and 16th centuries. In recent
years, however, engineers have begun to construct models of da Vinci's amazing machines and most of them actually work. In the following pages we'll look at some of the most imaginative -- and coolest -- of the designs that da Vinci sketched out in his notebooks.
10
10:Ball Bearing
9: Parachute
8: Ornithopter
7: Machine Gun
6: Diving Suit
5: Armored Tank
4: Self-Propelled Cart
3: City of the Future
2: Aerial Screw
1: Robotic Knight
Robotic Knight :If da Vinci's self-propelled cart was the first working design for a robotic vehicle, then the robotic knight would have been the first humanoid robot, a real 15th century C-3PO. Da Vinci was fascinated by human anatomy and spent long hours dissecting corpses in order to figure out how the human body worked. This gave him an understanding of how muscles propelled bone. He reasoned that these same principles could be applied to a machine. Unlike most of da Vinci's inventions, Leonar
d apparently actually built the robotic knight, though it was used primarily for entertainment at parties thrown by his wealthy patron Lodovico Sforza.
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 a work ing model of da Vinci's robotic knight and some of the concepts behind it have subsequently been used by Rosheim for the design of planetary exploration robots to be used by NASA. So after half a century of space exploration, da Vinci's designs have finally made it into outer space.
Aerial Screw: If nothing else, da Vinci's aerial screw is arguably one of the coolest designs that he ever sketched in his notebooks. Working much like a modern helicopter, this flying machine looks a lot like a giant whirling pinwheel. The "blades" of this helicopter were to have been made out of linen. When turned fast enough, they were intended to produce lift, the aeronautical phenomenon 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 aerial screw actually have worked in practice? Probably not. And that's a pity -- it would have looked amazing in flight.

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