Читать книгу The Rise of the Flying Machine - Hugo Byttebier - Страница 8

Leonardo da Vinci, the first Appreciation

The first attempt to study the laws that govern flight and to design a machine that would enable man to fly was made by Leonardo da Vinci around 1495/1500. Leonardo was the first genius of the Renaissance to recognize the endless possibilities of man-made mechanisms and he proceeded to fill notebooks with designs which are still in use today such as the parachute, the ball bearing, scissors, the odometer, portable bridges, and many more that have hardly been improved. Leonardo was one of the first to discover that by means of “an apparatus consisting of a number of rigid or elastic parts linked together in such a way as to have their motion completely determined, almost anything could be done”.

The idea of attempting flight with a man-made apparatus was too appealing to be left alone and Leonardo filled several more pages of his notebooks with designs, drawings and calculations so as to produce a machine that would enable man to fly. In the process, he invented an aerial screw, a parachute and a helicopter.

But in order to make horizontal flight possible, Leonardo had only the bird to guide his studies. He investigated the flapping movement of its wings and progressed from a machine moved by the arms to one moved by hands and feet but he finally became aware that man would never be capable of lifting himself into the air by means of even the most ingenious machine moved by his muscles, and across one of the last pages of his notes he wrote “Non è vero” and let the matter rest there.