Leonardo's Inventions

Apart from being a painter, sculptor, architect and engineer, Leonardo da Vinci was also a prolific inventor. Some of his inventions were so far ahead of their time that they were not realized until the 20th century.

As his name suggests, Leonardo was born in the town of Vinci, between Pisa and Florence in Italy. He was sent to study painting under Andrea del Verrocchio (Italy) c. 1470, and in 1482 he moved to Milan under the patronage of Duke Ludovico Sforza (Italy) who, with the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie, comissioned The Last Supper. After the Duke's fall from power, da Vinci moved to Florence where he painted the Mona Lisa. As da Vinci had worked for King Louis XII of France, Louis' successor, Francois I, granted him a year allowance from 1516 and allowed him the use of Chateau Cloux, near Amboise, where da Vinci lived until his death on 2 May 1519.
During the Renaissance there was little separation between the disciplines of art and science, and it was Leonardo's artistic skills that led to his inventive, scientific and engineering prowess. For him, observation was the key to knowledge, and he applied his painterly eye to discovering the workings of everything about him. While under the patronage of Sforza, he not only painted some of his greatest artworks, but also invented a number of military machines and drew designs for a parachute, an ornithopter, a helicopter, a glider and a human-powered aeroplane.

More than 500 years later, Steve Roberts (England) built Leonardo's fixed-wing glider in accordance with the original drawings, and it was successfully flown in October 2002 by British hand-gliding champion Judy Leden. Two years earlier Katarina Ollikanen (Sweden) had built da Vinci's rigid pyramidal parachute, and on 26 June 2000 skydiver Adrian Nicholas (England) proved that it worked, making a safe descent from 3000 meters over South Africa, and saying afterwards : "It took one of the greatest minds who ever lived to design it, but it took 500 years to find a man with a brain small enough to actually go and fly it."

Source - The Book Of Inventions by Ian Harrison