The name of Leonardo da Vinci the artist has been famous for nearly five hundred years. But not until recently have we known of Leonardo the scientist, who made the whole universe his field of study. Who today, whether individual or group, would attempt to explore such unrelated fields as power transmission and optics, city planning and weaponry, bridge building and flight? Leonardo investigated them all.
He stands out from his time as the first modern scientist, a man living in the fifteenth century, with twentieth century ideas. Working alone in a room full of plant specimens and machine parts, animal bones and rocks, surrounded with stacks of papers covered in his own notes. He developed plans for a helicopter, a projector, a double-decker city, a horseless wagon, and a telescope, and told no one about them. The depth and diversity of Leonardo’s insights into the laws of nature and the almost incredible range of his interests and abilities, are the subject of this fascinating book. Leonardo lived in the Renaissance, an age of exploration equaled only by our own, he worked in Italy and France for important patrons who one day might request plans for an air-conditioning machine, and the next day designs for a sumptuous court pageant. In his lifetime many of Leonardo’s gadgets and inventions came into being, but many more such as his water-turbine, parachute, machine gun, differential transmission system and screw-threading machine, remained untested in the pages of his notebooks, and so had to be invented anew centuries later.
Science, Leonardo wrote, is the knowledge of things possible in the future, of the present and of the past. For his comprehension of things possible and his contribution to the future, Leonardo deserves to live daily in the memory of mankind.
Informative and entertaining, Margaret Cooper’s The Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci is a book worthy of her complex subject, in it she discusses more than one hundred of Leonardo’s inventions, gadgets, plans, and pipedreams, each illustrated with the artist’s beautiful drawings or with photographs of models from the touring IBM exhibition, and relates them to the history of technology in the modern world. A freelance writer, researcher and editor of many years’ experience. Mrs. Cooper lives in New York City.
