Leonardo designs machines

The story

A job-seeker with a special letter

Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 near Vinci, a village in Tuscany. He learned to paint in Florence, in the workshop of the artist Andrea del Verrocchio, where colours were prepared, statues were carved and technology and mechanics were studied too. Around 1482, at the age of thirty, he left Florence and went to Milan, to the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza, known as “il Moro”, one of the most powerful rulers in Italy.

To get hired, Leonardo wrote the duke a letter. He did not present himself as a painter, but as a military engineer: he listed about ten things he could do, such as bridges that were easy to carry, weapons for besieging cities, armoured covered wagons and machines for throwing stones. Only at the end did he mention that he was also a sculptor and painter. The text we know is a copy, and it is not known whether it was sent in this exact form.

The notebooks

In the thirty-odd years that followed, Leonardo filled thousands of sheets with drawings and notes. He wrote from right to left, with the letters reversed as in a mirror: reading them takes a mirror, or a lot of patience. Perhaps he did it because he was left-handed and so did not smudge the ink, but nobody can say for certain. Many sheets are collected in the Codex Atlanticus, kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

In those pages there are machines of every kind: pumps, water wheels, winches, clocks, carts, musical instruments. There are also more fantastic designs, such as a “mechanical wing” that was meant to make a man fly by flapping like a bird, an aerial screw that looks like a helicopter, a huge crossbow, a tank made of shields, and a pyramid-shaped parachute.

The parachute and the wings

Leonardo's parachute, drawn around 1485, was a linen cloth stretched over a wooden pyramid frame. In 2000 a man, Adrian Nicholas, built a faithful copy and jumped from a hot-air balloon at over two thousand metres: he came down for a long stretch, then released the very heavy frame and landed with a modern parachute; the idea was proved all the same. Flying machines with wings, on the other hand, could not work: the muscles of a human being are not strong enough to hold him up in the air.

But Leonardo did not just design things: he observed. He studied the flight of birds, the flow of rivers, the beating of the heart, the muscles of the body, flowers and rocks. He dissected dozens of corpses to understand how a human being is built, and drew what he saw with astonishing precision.

In Milan Leonardo also worked on water. The city had a network of navigable canals, the Navigli, and he studied how to make boats go up and down between different levels with locks. Historians debate how far the invention of some solutions is really his, but his drawings of gates and canals show how much the subject mattered to him.

What he did not do

Almost none of his machines was built while he was alive. He often left works half done, and some important jobs, such as the great bronze horse for Ludovico il Moro, were never finished: a clay model seven metres tall was destroyed in 1499, when the French took Milan. In the same period, however, he painted the “Last Supper” in Milan (1495–1498).

After Milan he lived in Florence, in Rome and finally in France, at Amboise, where he died on 2 May 1519 in the service of King Francis I. His notebooks passed from hand to hand and were partly scattered. Two volumes, the Madrid Codices, were found in the National Library of Spain only in 1966, after being forgotten for centuries.