Inside the Mind of a Master
(continued) Indeed, one of the most astounding realizations I had, going through that exhibit, wasn't all the ways Leonardo da Vinci got it wrong. It was all the ways in which he got it right. Leonardo lived 200 years before Newton figured out the laws of motion so integral to flight, and 300 years before Sir George Cayley figured out that lift could be separated from thrust in a flying machine design. That's the equivalent of someone at the Salem witch trials trying to design a workable spacecraft with which to land on the moon.
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And yet, while the materials were lacking, some of his ideas were dead-on right. His mind, quite clearly, was hundreds of years ahead of its time. The exhibit showed two different designs he came up with for shock absorbers -- including a telescoping model that bears a striking resemblance to the oleo struts on the Piper Warrior in which I learned to fly. He designed a stepless, continuously variable-speed transmission that would be impressive even by today's standards of efficiency. He was right about the central importance of CG and equilibrium in a workable flying machine.
Recently, a group of skydivers even built and successfully flight tested a parachute Leonardo da Vinci designed in 1483. Landing with it might have been an issue, since it weighed 200 pounds, but the pyramid-shaped cloth-and-wood parachute actually flew. In 2003, another group successfully flew a modern-day version of Leonardo's "Piuma" glider, having reduced its weight from 220 pounds to 50 pounds through the use of aluminum-alloy tubes and Dacron instead of the original cloth and wood structure. The only thing that kept the original design from working, the Piuma group concluded, was Leonardo's lack of access to light, modern-day materials.
Looking at Leonardo's massive collection of drawings and studies, it's also clear that this was a man who didn't just study, but learned, because he remained open to the new ideas -- even the idea that he might have been wrong. Leonardo's later flying machine sketches had moved from the flapping wing designs to far more streamlined, fixed-wing gliders. Perhaps he acknowledged that the human body simply couldn't power a flying machine built with 16th century materials. But his studies of equilibrium allowed him to see that in a glider, control could come from the pilot's shifting of body and weight.
The line between Leonardo da Vinci's glider drawings and modern-day hang gliders is straight and direct. And while the Wright brothers used more sophisticated control methods in their glider and Flyer, their work was heavily inspired by Otto Lilienthal and Octave Chanute -- both of whom had designed and tested weight-shifting gliders. Not only that, but Leonardo's studies of a possible helicopter (although he didn't call it that) was what inspired a Russian immigrant named Igor Sikorsky to investigate this kind of intriguing flying machine, leading to the world's first successful helicopter.
So what does all this tell us? All sorts of things -- and each of us, going through that exhibit, would undoubtedly take away something slightly different. But three thoughts stood out most to me. The first was just how much groundwork Leonardo da Vinci laid for future investigations of flight and the development of flying machines, both in concept and in approach. We laud the Wright Brothers as the fathers of flight. But they were sons, as well … as were the pioneers before them. In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton acknowledged as much when he said, "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
The second thought was, as hard as it is to imagine a world 500 years in the future, that day will come. And to those who live then, our frustrated efforts at intransient and seemingly insolvable engineering and physics problems will no doubt seem as fundamental -- flawed, perhaps, and limited by available materials and energy sources, but still important as preliminary investigations -- as Leonardo da Vinci's work now seems to us. We, too, are the giants whose shoulders some future generation will stand upon, even if we think we've failed.
And the third, and perhaps most important, thought is this: that to be those giants; to push the edges of knowledge and possibility forward and outward … we must remember to nurture art as well as science. For as Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." If Leonardo da Vinci saw so much further into the future than his peers, it's because he had the eye of an artist as well as the mind of an engineer. He also had an insatiable curiosity, and the strength to keep his mind open to new ideas and changes in thought and opinion. Even if we're 500 years more modern, with far more technology at our disposal … and even if we're not inventing the fountain pen, painting famous portraits, building cathedrals or designing fantastical flying machines … we all could benefit from following Leonardo's lead on that one.
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