During the Renaissance, cultured men were expected to be learned across a broad range of disciplines. This gave rise to the phrase “Renaissance man.” Leonardo da Vinci outdid them all. He became one of the greatest European artists of the era — rivaled only by Michelangelo — and an extraordinarily prescient technological innovator and cutting-edge thinker in about a dozen other specialties.
A new exhibit at the Connecticut Science Center, imported from the Museo Leonardo da Vinci in Florence, Italy, focuses on Da Vinci’s mechanical explorations. Variations on his tinkerings are still in use today: chain drives, anemometers, parachutes, hang gliders, tanks. The man best known for painting “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper” even invented a primitive robot to look like a suit of armor with a chest full of gears.
“He came up with ideas for a lot of the things we take for granted today, like screws and ball bearings. Some of them were around in his time, but he used them in different ways,” said Hank Gruner, vice president of programs at the science center. “The different combinations of how he applied them created the building blocks for how machines work, how energy is transferred.”
During Leonardo’s lifetime, many of his creations remained on the drawing board. “The technology of the time was limiting to him,” Gruner said. “He might have wanted to execute a number of these, but he didn’t have the technology to do it.”
The exhibit brings those schematics to life as working machines that visitors can operate. All 40 items in the exhibit are made with materials that were available during the time of Leonardo (1452-1519), such as metal, leather and predominantly wood. Woodworkers and carpenters may find the exhibit especially intriguing.
“One of the things that Da Vinci was big about was that he believed that the motions of the Earth, in the form of earth, air, fire and water, could be used to drive functions and make things,” Gruner said. This focus gave birth to his air meter — the forefather to air-traffic controllers’ anemometers — and his humidity meter, which placed equal weights of water-repelling wax on one side of a scale and water-absorbing cotton on the other.
Many creations were designed to make common functions easier: an olive-oil press, an automated blacksmith’s hammer, a printing press operable by one person. Some were created at the request of war-minded politicians, such as his “bombard” cannon, his 10-barreled trajectory-controlled gun, a self-supporting, easily assembled and unassembled bridge and an armored tank that looks like a round hut filled with gears.
Some focused on turning one kind of movement into a different kind, such as converting back-and-forth motion into revolving motion or rotary motion into one-way motion. Many of his designs were noteworthy in Da Vinci’s pioneering of the “exploding design” sketch, a sketch that shows how all the pieces should fit together, much like the toy-assembly guidebooks that torment parents on Christmas eve.
The most glorious of his creations, however, were inspired by fantasies he cooked up by watching bats and birds of prey in flight. He once said, “I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.” Although he was centuries before his time and unable to do that, the seeds of later innovations can be seen in his hang glider. His “ornithopter,” modeled on bird flight, places a man in a wooden basket, which theoretically would ascend to the skies as he operates a set of pullies with his head, arms and legs.
The robot, in the lobby of the exhibition hall, shows Da Vinci’s visionary foresight on the subject of automation. But it’s the smaller inventions that paved the way. “To go from this invention that drops a hammer — you can see why he invented that, it’s intuitive — to extrapolate that to a suit of armor and make a mechanical man, that’s extraordinary,” Gruner said. “That’s why he’s Da Vinci.”
“LEONARDO DA VINCI: MACHINES IN MOTION” will be at the CT Science Center, 250 Columbus Blvd. in Hartford, until Jan. 8, 2017. ctsciencecenter.org