Leonardo da Vinci

Date: Born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Tuscany, Italy; died on May 2, 1519 at Cloux Chateau, Amboise, France
Definition: The first person to design flying machines and a parachute.
Significance: Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for several fanciful human-powered flying machines and a heliocopter-like airscrew. He also sketched a potentially practical pyramidal parachute.
Leonardo da Vinci is best known as the painter of the Mona Lisa (1503). Owing to the enormous breadth and range of his talents and interests, he is considered the original Renaissance man. Among his interests was an obsession with flying machines.
Although da Vinci was given a good education for a boy from a small Tuscan town in Renaissance Italy, he was never a scholar and cheerfully acknowledged the accusation of critics that he was “a man without learning.” He wrote well but, being left-handed, he also developed for his notes an idiosyncratic and almost indecipherable mirror-image style of writing that ran right to left with the letters also reversed left to right. He never published these personal notes and sketches. On his death, his papers were willed to his apprentice and friend Francesco Melzi, who kept them for about fifty years. On Melzi’s death, the collection was sold and scattered.
For all these reasons, da Vinci’s work had little impact on developments in science and technology. Nonetheless, his sketches of flying machines were recognized well before the era of workable flying machines. Da Vinci favored flapping wings powered by the combined efforts of arms and legs because he recognized the impossibility of flight powered by human arms alone. His early preference for “bat wings” faded as articulation problems became clear. An intensive study of bird flight left him uncertain of how to coordinate the timing of wing motions with the powering arm and leg motions. Although he spent some thirty years studying flight, none of his designs seem to have led to actual models or trials.
The weaknesses of human power were fully apparent to later pioneers off light, as were the deficiencies off lapping wings. Hence, da Vinci’s designs made no contribution to the details of realistic flying machines. Although Octave Chanute suggested the wing warping of the Wright brothers was an extension of Leonardo’s plans, the Wrights explicitly denied the connection. Da Vinci’s only confirmed contribution to actual flight was as a stimulator and encourager of the dream.
It is also doubtful that da Vinci’s airscrew design, which might at least have made a good toy, had any direct influence on the development of helicopters. On the other hand, working parachutes dating from the late eighteenth century may have been inspired by Leonardo’s design.