Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was born near the town of Vinci, outside Florence. He trained as a painter in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then worked in Milan, Florence, Rome and finally France. We know him for paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. He also filled thousands of notebook pages with studies of water, birds, the human body, light and machines.
Key idea
The notebooks
About 7,000 pages of his notes survive, scattered across collections; many more were lost. He wrote most of them in mirror writing, from right to left, so they are easiest to read in a mirror. He was left-handed, and writing right to left kept him from smearing the ink. He rarely finished a treatise, and the notes were not published in his lifetime.
Learning from experience
Leonardo trusted what he could test over what old books said. In the notebooks he wrote:
Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.
The problem of flight
Leonardo watched birds and bats for years and wrote a small notebook on the flight of birds around 1505. He drew machines where a person would flap wings with arms and legs, and a screw-shaped device often called his helicopter. His notes show him thinking about balance and how the wing should be built.
Remember that your flying machine must imitate no other than the bat, because the web is what by its union gives the armour, or strength to the wings.
Man when flying must stand free from the waist upwards so as to be able to balance himself as he does in a boat so that the centre of gravity in himself and in the machine may counterbalance each other.
What failed, and why
People are not strong enough to fly by flapping. Our arm and leg muscles are far weaker for our weight than a bird's chest muscles. Leonardo seems to have come to doubt flapping too, and later drawings lean toward gliding. There is no good evidence that any of his flying machines left the ground. The idea that worked came four centuries later: fixed wings for lift, a separate engine for push, and controls for balance.
The eye and the dark room
Leonardo compared the eye to a dark room with a small hole, following the optics of Ibn al-Haytham that had reached Europe in Latin.
If the front of a building—or any open piazza or field—which is illuminated by the sun has a dwelling opposite to it, and if, in the front which does not face the sun, you make a small round hole, all the illuminated objects will project their images through that hole and be visible inside the dwelling on the opposite wall which may be made white; and there, in fact, they will be upside down.
Story or history?
You may see models labeled "Leonardo's tank" or "Leonardo's helicopter." These were built in modern times from his drawings, often with changes to make them work. In his own day they stayed on paper. His studies of anatomy and water were far ahead of his time; his machines are best seen as ideas.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1452 | Born near Vinci, Tuscany |
| c. 1466–1476 | Trains in Verrocchio's workshop in Florence |
| 1482 | Moves to Milan to work for Duke Ludovico Sforza |
| c. 1495–1498 | Paints The Last Supper |
| c. 1505 | Writes the small notebook on the flight of birds (now in Turin) |
| 1516 | Moves to France at the invitation of King Francis I |
| 1519 | Dies at Amboise, France |
| 1883 | Jean Paul Richter publishes an English selection of the notebooks |
Worked example: How old?
- $1505 - 1452 = 53$.
Answer: About 53.
What it led to
Because his notes were scattered and unpublished, Leonardo's machines had little direct effect on later engineers. His deeper legacy is a way of working: observe closely, draw exactly, ask how it works, and test ideas against nature. The Wright brothers, four hundred years later, also started by watching birds.
Common mistake
Read more: Leonardo da Vinci.