I agree, he was a visionary, I disagree that he was an engineer.
Very few of his machines obeyed any of the constraints of his time, ie worked.
To provide an up to date example, Ali G plonked a skateboard 'plank' down in front of a Venture Capitalist, and said " there's a hoverboard, just like in Back to The Future"
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
i sort of agree with greg ...
he obviously had a wonderfull intellect (leonardo, not greg) but i'd replace "invented" in the original post with "thought of" or "sketched". CEOs the world over have similar thoughts (brain f@rts?), and with similar ignorance of today's understanding of the physical world, but we don't think of them as brillant; at least not untill one of grunts has created something usefull (saleable?) out of the idea.
A troublesome problem since it may not be his engineering that was at fault as often as it was his marketing.
Quite a few of his designs have been recreated (interpreted) in the materials of his day, and proven quite functional. (This is popular dumbed down television these days....a bunch of academics with a horny handed craftsman to do the grunt work but very little real insights or illumination in many of these programs)
In many respects he suffered from the same problem as many an inventor today: he didn't ask the questions "so what?" or "Who cares?" or better yet, "who will buy it?"
Of course, we also have to be careful about whether we judge his skills as an engineer by todays definition or the definition of the times.
Leonardo invented many and wonderous things but he didn't draw everything he is sometimes credited with - his 'bicycle' was shown to be a recent forgery some years ago.
I was under the impression that Leonardo's notebooks were not published until 1822. He did not affect his contemporaries very much.
During the Medieval era, engineers and artists were one and the same person. If you need a statue of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus, or a machine to pour boiling oil on unwanted visitors, you went to the same person. There wasn't a whole lot of math and physics going on. Read up on early steam engines. Practical steam engines were developed long before anyone understood heat engine cycles.
My observation of Leonardo's ornithopter drawings is that he was trying to work out the flapping mechanisms. These are shown in extreme detail. I doubt that he tried building any of them because if he had, he would have learned the importance of low wing loading, and the importance of placing the wings near the centre of gravity. The lack of landing gear would be an issue too. Ouch!
The first draft of a bicycle is what we see in the reproduced sketch bellow, discovered by Prof. Augusto Marinoni towards the half of years ' 60, during the jobs of restoration of the Atlantic Code attributed to Leonardo. According Marinoni the drawing, dated from 1490 approximately, is not surely to have been made by Leonardo, but more probably was drawn by one of his pupils.
drawoh
On my first post I just said that Leonardo da Vince was well beyond of his time only because on XV/XVI century he had a vision of much of the machines of today. He was a visionary. He makes part of those men of the humanistic revival of classical art, architecture, literature, and learning that originated in Italy in the 14th century and later spread throughout Europe. The period of this revival, roughly the 14th through the 16th century marks the transition from medieval to modern times. Da Vince was not a man from medieval era.
Excuse me drawoh
But the English is not my birth language I didn’t catch you when you say “If you need a statue of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus, or a machine to pour boiling oil on unwanted visitors, you went to the same person” what did you really want to say?
I do not know if Da Vince can or can’t be considered as an engineer but lots of people contemporaneous and post contemporaneous of Da Vince (1452-1519) such as; Paracelsus (1493-1541) who discovers Hydrogen and Nitrogen; Copernicus (1473-1543) who discovers the solar system more or less as it is today; Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) who discovers some stars latitudes; Galileo Galilee (1564-1642) who discovers the gravity force behaviour; and at last Isaac Newton 1642-1727 who discover the universal law of gravitation and in a certain way was the precursor of Einstein theories, all of them were great men with a large contribution to mankind knowledge.
In XV/XVI century, Inquisition was very dangerous for those who were beyond of their time.
This forum is about engineering history isn’t it?
Today, or at least when I went to college in Canada, we called the arts students "artsies", and we did not take them seriously. This distinction did not exist in Leonardo's day. Paintings, sculptures, churches and fortifications were made by the same group of craftsmen, who sought out contracts, hired apprentices and assistants, and generally managed projects. I believe that it is one of Boticcelli's (sp?) pictures has an angel on it that was almost certainly painted by his apprentice, Leonardo.
The usual date for the end of the Renaissance is that of the sack of Rome by Imperial troops in 1527. There was not a whole lot of burning of heretics prior to this date, although things picked up once the Catholics and Protestants started to work against each other. The Great Witch Hunt took place mostly in Germany between XVI and XVIII. There were executions in France, England and Italy. Apparently, the Spanish Inquisition had higher standards of evidence, and did not burn any.
The Renaissance period was a disaster for Italy, ending in widespread devastation, and conquest by foreigners. I do not know that much about the life of Leonardo da Vinci, but I suspect that working for the King of France would have placed him in far more danger in Italy than any religious beliefs he may have held.
Leonardo da Vinci was an engineer. Yes, many of his inventions were really "conceptual ideas", but by looking at some of the military engineering work that he did it's clear to me that the man knew how to make things work as well. Here is his "resume" in a famous letter to Ludovico the Moor:
If the man had the fine sense not to try and build some of the unworkable trinkets he was sketching that doesn't make him an 'engineer', it makes him a 'good engineer'.
