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 wealthy 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: Ball Bearing

As an invention, the ball bearing doesn't seem all that

impressive, but much of modern technology depends
on it. Ball bearings make it possible for drive shafts to
rotate, 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 between
moving surfaces, ball bearings eliminate friction. The
idea can be traced back to the Roman Empire, but
many historians believe that da Vinci's notebooks
contain the first practical designs. Many of the devices
that he conceived depend on them and wouldn't have
operated without them. Of course, as with many of da
Vinci's ideas, the concept was never made widely
known and the ball bearing had to be reinvented by someone else.
9: Parachute

The speed at which a body falls depends on two

factors: the force of the gravity pulling it downward
and the resistance of the atmosphere through which it
is falling. If there were no atmosphere, a falling body
would simply accelerate to higher and higher speeds
until it hit a surface, but air tends to slow it down until
it reaches its so-called terminal velocity. Different
objects have different terminal velocities. The terminal
velocity of a human being falling through the earth's
atmosphere -- a skydiver with an unopened chute, for
instance -- is about 120 mph (193.1 kilometers per
hour). That's surprisingly slow, but still fast enough
that a person falling from an airplane would make a
pretty big splat upon hitting the ground. The idea of a
parachute 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 way
for people to drift gracefully through the air. Its pyramid-shaped framework was draped with
cloth. As da Vinci wrote in his notebooks, it would allow a man "to throw himself down from
any great height without suffering any injury." Twenty-first century attempts to build the
design 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 his
inventions. One of the results of this fascination was
the ornithopter, a device conceived by da Vinci that
would theoretically have allowed humans to soar
through the air like birds. While da Vinci's parachute
would have allowed a human being to jump off a cliff
without being hurt, the ornithopter was actually a way
for 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 are
designed to flap as the pilot turns a crank. This
invention demonstrates da Vinci's strong grasp of
aerodynamics and modern attempts to reproduce the ornithopter show that it could indeed
have flown -- that is, if it were already in the air. Taking off under the weak propulsion
supplied by human muscles would have been much trickier.

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

Da Vinci's machine gun, or "33-barrelled organ," wasn't

a machine gun in the modern sense. It couldn't fire
multiple bullets rapidly out of a single barrel. It could,
however, deliver punishing volleys of gunfire at rapid
intervals and, if it had been built, would have effectively
mowed-down oncoming infantry.

The mechanism behind the machine gun is simple. Da

Vinci proposed mounting 11 muskets side by side on a
rectangular board, then attaching three such boards
together in a triangular arrangement. By placing a
shaft down the middle, the entire contraption could be
rotated, so that one set of 11 guns could be fired while
a second set cooled off and a third set was being
reloaded. Then the entire mechanism could be rotated
to bring the loaded set to the top where it could be
fired again.

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

6: Diving Suit

While living in Venice in the late 15th century, da Vinci

devised a far-fetched idea for repelling invading ships:
Send men to the bottom of the harbor in diving suits
and let them cut holes in enemy hulls. Well, maybe that
doesn't sound so far-fetched any more. It's fairly
common now for frogmen with scuba gear to engage in
underwater sabotage. In da Vinci's time, however, the
idea was unheard of. Da Vinci's divers would have
carried breathing hoses connected to a floating bell full
of air, wearing facemasks with glass goggles that would
help them see underwater. In another version of the
concept, the divers would have breathed from wine
bladders filled with air. In both versions, the men would
carry a bottle to urinate in so that they could stay
underwater indefinitely. Da Vinci's design was not only
feasible -- it was practical!

These diving suits might actually have been constructed, except that the invaders they were
intended to repel were driven away by the Venetian navy before underwater sabotage
became necessary.
5: Armored Tank

While working for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, da

Vinci proposed what may have been his ultimate war
machine: the armored tank. Driven by the muscle
power of eight men, the armored tank was a
turtle-like moving shell with 36 guns poking out of its
sides. It was operated by a system of gears propelled
by cranks that turned a sequence of wheels. The
eight men would have been protected by the outer
shell so that they could have driven the tank at about
walking speed right into the heat of battle without
being hurt. The guns, firing in all directions, would
have been devastating to enemy ranks.

The diagram of the armored tank in da Vinci's

notebooks contains a curious flaw: the gearing
causes the front wheels to move in the opposite
direction 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 have
proposed a number of reasons why da Vinci would have made it deliberately. Maybe he
didn't really want the war machine to be built. Or maybe he was afraid that his diagram
would fall into enemy hands, so he made the error to assure that nobody else could build
the tank but him.

4: Self-Propelled Cart

Da Vinci's self-propelled cart can be looked at as

history's first car. In fact, because it has no driver, it
can be looked at as history's first robot vehicle, too.

The drawings that da Vinci made of the car in his

notebooks don't fully reveal the mechanism inside and
modern engineers have had to guess at what made it
go. The best guess is that it used a spring-driven
mechanism similar to that in a clock. The
"mainsprings" are contained inside drum-shaped
casings and can be wound up by hand. As the springs
uncoil, 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 the
cart 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 to
imagine that, had it actually been built, useful applications would have shortly followed.
3: City of the Future

When Leonardo was living in Milan around the year

1400, the Black Plague devastated Europe. Cities
suffered far more than the countryside and da Vinci
theorized that something about cities made them
especially vulnerable to disease. This idea is
surprisingly modern, given that the germ theory of
disease didn't become well established until the early
20th century. Da Vinci was inspired to draw out plans
for one of his most ambitious inventions: A planned
city, designed from the ground up to be sanitary and
livable.

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 on
the 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 modern
plumbing. 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 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.
1: 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, Leonard 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
working 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.

Sources

● American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

"Leonardo da Vinci. (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=425

● British Library.
"Online Gallery: Leonardo da Vinci." (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/leonardo/leonardo.html

● Galileo.org.
"The Ideal City." 2002. (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://partner.galileo.org/tips/davinci/idealcity.html

● Leonardo-da-vinci-biography.com.
"Great Leonardo da Vinci Inventions." June 4, 2009. (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.leonardo-da-vinci-biography.com/leonardo-da-vinci-inventions.html

● Leonardo da Vinci Inventions.

"Leonardo da Vinci: an Inventor Ahead of His Time." 2008. (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.da-vinci-inventions.com/

● LiveScience.com.
"Leonardo da Vinci's 10 Best Ideas." (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.livescience.com/history/davinci_bestideas_top10-1.html
 ● Loadstar's Lair.
"Leonardo: The Man, His Machines." (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.lairweb.org.nz/leonardo/

● Saptakee Sengupta.
"Leonardo da Vinci Inventions." Buzzle.com. July 19, 2010. (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/leonardo-da-vinci-inventions.html

● Timelines.
"Leonardo da Vinci Designs His Ideal City." (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://timelines.com/1488/leonardo-da-vinci-designs-his-ideal-city

● Timelines.
"Leonardo da Vinci Sketches the Design for the Aerial Screw." (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://timelines.com/1493/leonardo-da-vinci-sketches-the-design-for-the-aerial-screw

● Universal Leonardo.
"The Ideal City." (Jan. 20, 2011)
http://www.universalleonardo.org/work.php?id=519

http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/famous-inventors/10-leonardo-da-vinci-inventions.htm