Da Vinci the Inventor

Leonardo da Vinci was a man of great genius and skill. These skills encompassed a

multitude of different fields and enabled him to become the very personification of the term

“Renaissance man”. Though renowned for his artistic abilities, it is often overlooked that another

of the areas in which da Vinci was so successful was in that of inventing. Leonardo da Vinci

filled journals upon journals with ideas and inventions, and many of them were hundreds of

years ahead of their time. (4)

Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in Anchiano, Tuscany. His biological parents were

not married and after several moves during his early years, he ended up being raised on the estate

of his father, under the watch of an uncle with whom he fostered the bond of shared interests.

Even in his earliest years, da Vinci had expressed a fascination with machines, manifested in

some of his first drawings and papers. The future artist’s formal education only basically covered

the topics of reading, writing, and math. He was able to expand on this base, however, with his

more extensive study of mathematics conducted under Friar Luca Bartolomeo de Paccioli. After

da Vinci covered these more general fields, he was able to begin his career and studies as an

artist. The official beginning to this path of his life was when his father took him to work as an

apprentice under Andrea del Verrocchio when he was just fifteen years old. While he was

working and painting in Verrocchio’s workshop, Leonardo da Vinci was exposed to a multitude

of different machines. Da Vinci was able to use and observe these machines, and this exposure

allowed him to gain knowledge about design and structure which would surely benefit his future

career as an inventor. (2, 4)

From these first experiences with machines, da Vinci began to build his theories and

plans for a future with machines. One of his goals was to be the person to first write out
systematic explanations for how machines work and how their pieces could be separately studied

and used, an idea which spawned from his own attitude towards the importance of a machine’s

individual pieces. In this attitude, Leonardo da Vinci was both unique and ahead of the other

inventors of his time. He believed that understanding each component of a machine would help

in being able to modify and combine them into new creations. Da Vinci’s attitude toward

inventing was developed for the time also in the way that the typical connotation for terms such

as ‘craftsmen’ was a person whose job it was to simply repair existing machines, rather than

develop and build completely new ones. Despite his differences to the period’s current inventors,

da Vinci still was put up against the same challenges as all the others. Challenges such as the fact

that the governments of the time would commonly steal the inventions and ideas of any inventors

that they happened to discover, and even though Leonardo da Vinci’s home of the Republic of

Venice was one of the few places in Europe where this did not take place, every precaution was

still taken. These precautions are best exhibited in da Vinci’s numerous journals, for they would

have been written using the popular form of “mirror-image cursive”, which would inhibit the

ability of others to read any of his written plans, and making use of a “trade secret”, or leaving

out one important piece from any images of your designs, so that they could not be used to make

a correct version of your machine should they fall to one of your opponents in the field of

inventing. Despite any anxieties or extra-precautions da Vinci may have had or taken, the

Republic of Venice would have been a safe, ideal place for Leonardo da Vinci, and any other of

the day’s inventors, to do their work, what with the safeties of respect from the public and access

to some of the world’s first patents. Working in this haven of inventors, da Vinci was able to

imagine and design a whole multitude of theories and devices that would not reappear for

hundreds of years. (2, 3)

 Largely because of Leonardo da Vinci’s secrecy with how he wrote and hid his journals,

including the plans and diagrams within them, he did not have any real effect on the

technological advancement of his time, and he never saw many of his inventions achieve actual

existence. However, many years after his death, his many notebooks and journals were

discovered, and discovered to be full of advanced and remarkable machines that had not been

imagined again until hundreds of years after da Vinci had died. Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks

proved the spectacularism of his mind as they showed that he seemed to almost predict the future

of technological advancements. Some of his inventions that express this most profoundly will

follow below.

 The Ball Bearing- Rather unremarkable, the ball bearing plays a critical part in a whole

multitude of other machines, allowing them to move smoothly and function properly.

 Ornithopter- Da Vinci was fascinated by birds and their ability to fly. This invention

highlighted this interest and has been proven to be functional once in the air.

 Armored Tank- Many of da Vinci’s inventions were made for battle, in addition the tank,

this would include his ideas for machine guns, an artillery park, a giant crossbow, a

machine for storming walls, and a sort of diving suit.

 Parachute- Leonardo da Vinci also created the first designs for a device to slow the fall of

objects through air. Scientists later discovered that da Vinci’s initial plans would, in fact,

be able to achieve the effect of any modern parachute.

 Robotic Knight- This is perhaps the most remarkable invention discovered amongst da

Vinci’s notes, a functioning robot. Unlike many of his other inventions, da Vinci is said

to have built a real model of this one. This may be perhaps the most impressive of da

Vinci’s achievements- building a robot, in the fifteenth century. (1, 5)

 Leonardo da Vinci was learned and skilled in a whole assortment of fields. He has proved

himself repeatedly to a be so, through his artwork, through his theories of science, and

through the numerous inventions that he was able to design hundreds of years before the

proper technology was created. (4)

Works Cited

1) https://www.thoughtco.com/inventions-of-leonardo-davinci-4122923

2) https://www.mos.org/leonardo/inventor

3) https://www.inventor-strategies.com/leonardo-da-vinci-inventions.html

4) https://www.history.com/topics/leonardo-da-vinci

5) https://www.geniusstuff.com/blogs/10-leonardo-da-vinci-inventions10.htm