STUDENT LEARNING GUIDE

LEONARDO DA V I N C I
MAN INVENTOR GENIUS

meet leonardo
Dear Student: Could you be the next Leonardo da Vinci? Leonardo was infinitely curious, creative and inventive. As youll read in this supplement, he made extraordinary contributions in the areas of flight, anatomy, mechanics and more. The special exhibit Leonardo da Vinci: Man, Inventor, Genius brings to life 60 models of Leonardos famous concepts and drawings. You can push, pull, crank and interact with the models in the exhibit for a better understanding of the math, engineering and physics principles behind them. At the Detroit Science Center, its our mission to inspire our visitors to pursue and support careers in engineering, technology and science. We hope to inspire you to become the next great inventor, scientist, physicist or even Leonardo da Vinci. Sincerely,

Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci was an artist, a scientist, an inventor and a genius. Leonardo the artist gave the world one of its most famous paintings, the Mona Lisa, as well as The Last Supper and The Vitruvian Man that appears on the cover of this special education section. Leonardo the scientist made inroads in anatomy, zoology, optics, geology, botany, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. Leonardo the innovator was responsible for advances in hydraulic machines, cannons, tanks, gear shifts, map making, catapults, parachutes, engineering, automobiles, hang gliders, scuba gear, swimming aids and even submarines. He was so ahead of his time that few of his inventions could be created with the materials and manuSelf-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci facturing methods that existed at the time he lived. Leonardo, the man, was born on of masterpieces and a thinker of ingenuity, April 15, 1452, in Vinci, outside of the Leonardo had Florence and Milan competItalian city of Florence. A keen observer ing for his time and genius by 1507. He of nature with a talent for drawing, also traveled to Rome to work for Pope 15-year-old Leonardo became an apprenLeo X. tice to painter Andrea del Verrocchio Leonardo da Vinci left Italy for France in until he became a master himself. 1516 and remained there until he died in In late 1482 or early 1483, Leonardo left 1519. Florence and offered his services to the Duke of Milan, both as an artist and as a designer of weaponry, buildings and the renaissance man machinery. He also produced studies on Quick quiz: What is Leonardo da nature, mechanics, anatomy and architecVincis last name? Da Vinci? Just ture during his many years in the Dukes Vinci? Actually, its a trick quescourt. tion. Leonardo didnt have a last While in Milan, Leonardo also opened name. His parents were never marhis first studio, and started training ried and he didnt take his fathers apprentices. It quickly became a gathering name, even though he grew up on place for artists and thinkers. his fathers estate. Da Vinci simply When the French occupied Milan in means from Vinci. Most histori1499, Leonardo returned to Florence. ans and scientists refer to him simHaving established himself as a creator ply as Leonardo.

Kevin F. Prihod President & CEO Detroit Science Center

Leonardos World
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) lived in a time and place teeming with possibilities and new ideas. It also was a time of great social inequalities, epidemic illnesses, war, rigid class systems, witch burnings, The Inquisition and religious conflict.
The Renaissance Leonardo da Vinci was a man of the Renaissance, which was a period of history from the late 1300s to about 1600. The Renaissance, which means rebirth, was a period of remarkable advances in European art, philosophy, science, architecture, engineering and literature. Nothing like it had been seen since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the Fifth Century. In leading families, the Renaissance was a time to excel in the arts, learning, languages, athletics and social graces. For instance, a nobleman might make sure his sons could dance; write poetry; speak and write Greek, French, Latin and other languages; know astronomy and math; fence, arch, hunt, ride horses and play an instrument, among many other skills. This at a time when the majority of people couldnt read! Princesses, high-ranking noblewomen and daughters of particularly enlightened parents would be educated as well, but that was not the norm. Leonardo was not a nobleman. He received a pre-apprenticeship education suitable for a craftsperson and only began to learn Latin when he was 50. Nonetheless, Leonardo is considered the consummate Renaissance Man. Today, we use the term to refer to someone who can do many different things well. Power in the Renaissance The political world of Europe was divided differently than it is now. For instance, instead of voting for leaders, regions would be ruled by royalty who inherited their power (or took it by force). Kings, queens, princes and princesses from different regions would marry each other to create alliances and strengthen ties between them.

They Could Have Had Dinner

These people were all alive during Leonardos lifetime. Kings Richard III (England), Henry VIII (England), Ferdinand (Aragon, Spain) Queen Isabella (Castile, Spain) Explorer Christopher Columbus Artists Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Hieronymus Bosch Movable Type Printing Press Inventor Johannes Gutenberg Protestant Reformation Leader Martin Luther Thinkers Erasmus, Niccol Machiavelli, Thomas More Astronomer Copernicus

Model of Leonardos Hammer with Eccentric Cam

As a result, European rulers in Leonardos time were a collection of near and distant cousins by blood and by marriage. Despite this, rulers constantly jockeyed and fought wars for more land, better resources and a bigger spotlight on the European stage. Alliances shifted and borders changed. Beyond the monarchies of kings and queens, the Catholic Church held the greatest power in Europe. Sovereigns were beholden to no one, except to God. And as Gods representative on Earth in the Catholic Church, the Pope in many ways had more practical power than any other ruler.
Patrons Leonardo, like many artists during the Renaissance, worked for wealthy individuals or groups under a system of patronage. Patrons would support and advance artists. The better the artist and the work he produced, the more prestigious it was for the patron.

When Leonardo was sponsored by the Duke of Milan, he was on hand to paint portraits and work as a military engineer. While a prize catch for any patron, Leonardo did have a huge flaw that annoyed many of his sponsors. He accepted commissions and began many works that he never finished. However, he was so good, that some of his unfinished works are still considered masterpieces.

Activity
You, like Leonardo, live in exciting times. The world has changed drastically in the last 100 years. As a class, create a list of changes (good and bad) that have occurred since 1908 in the following fields: medicine, art, communication, weaponry, travel, technology and social equality. Discuss what youd like to see happen in the next 100 years.

mechanics
Leonardos Notebooks
If you want to form a mental picture of Leonardo da Vinci, think of him scribbling away on paper rather than painting slowly and carefully. Leonardo covered thousands and thousands of pages with notes, drawings, sketches for his paintings and designs for machines and devices. Compare this with the fewer than 20 paintings of his (some unfinished) that exist today. Some of his pages feature sketches upon sketches. One of the most striking things about these pages is the strange-looking writing, which appears at first glance to be a secret code. Actually, Leonardo wrote backwards, from right to left. Hold a mirror up to this page or the front cover to see if you can make out some of the letters. Some historians think this was a way to keep other people from stealing his designs. Others guess a much less dramatic reason: Leonardo was a lefty and didnt want to smear his ink. It is from his notebooks that we have learned much of what we know about Leonardos designs and can reconstruct them for ourselves. When checking out his designs, its important to remember that Leonardo lived in a time hundreds of years before machines ran on electricity, before cars, before photographs, before TV, before computers. Yet it wouldnt be far off to say that his work inspired many an inventor of the modern age.

Leonardo sketch with signature mirror writing

machines, are just a series of simple machines cleverly linked together. The principle is the same in every case: exert some energy at one end, and the machine converts it into something else. This conversion could be a change in direction, a change in speed or a change in the way effort is expended. For instance, a seesaw, which is a type of lever, changes the direction of energy. To make your classmate on the other side of the board go UP in the air, you sit DOWN on your side.

Then set up the ladder again at dusk to retrieve it. B. Attach the flag to a fixed pulley system. By using the loop of rope sliding along a fixed pulley attached to the top of the pole, you can stay on the ground and pull down on the rope to raise the flag.
Distribute the Weight Lets say you wanted to lift a 100-pound disco ball up to the ceiling. You could (if you were an Olympic weightlifter) climb up a ladder and lug the disco ball with you, but you already know that if you use a fixed pulley on the ceiling, you can just pull on the rope instead.

Pulleys
Leonardo often used pulleys in his designs. A pulley is a simple machine that can help you pick things up with a rope, chain or belt. Pulleys loop the rope around a fixed grooved wheel. Pulleys are helpful because they change the direction of energy and also can distribute weight in a way that makes heavy objects easier to handle.
Change Direction Want to fly a flag every day on a tall flagpole and then take it down at night? You have two options: A. Get a ladder, climb up the pole and tie the flag to the pole.

Simple Machines
Simple machines including wedges, pulleys, gears, springs, screws, levers, wheels, axles and inclined planes are the building blocks of all mechanisms. Leonardos inventions, like all complex

the renaissance man

A 72-page collection of original pages from Leonardos notebooks was sold to Bill Gates for $30.8 million in 1994, making it the most expensive book ever.

Pulley systems, like this one found in Leonardos notebooks, can make lifting heavy objects much easier by distributing the weight throughout a rope. The machine operator pulls down at the rope on the far right to easily hoist the weight at the far left.

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But that 100 pounds is still going to be a pain. Luckily, you can use a movable pulley system to distribute the weight in a much more manageable way. You can minimize the amount of effort you use by increasing the distance you have to pull. Imagine that one end of the rope is anchored to the ceiling. Then it is run through a pulley attached to a ball. Next, you run the rope though a fixed pulley on the ceiling. In effect, youve halved the force you have to exert by doubling the length of rope you need to pull. Youll feel like youre pulling 50 pounds, but youll be pulling twice as long. Fifty pounds is still quite a load and its easy to cut down on the weight even further just attach another movable pulley to the ball and another fixed pulley to the ceiling and loop the rope through. This will quarter the force you have to use to pull 25 pounds but youll have to pull the rope four times the distance.

Left: A simple gear train. If you turn the green gear clockwise, the red gear spins counter-clockwise, twice as fast. What will the yellow gear do? Right: A bevel gear can change the plane of rotation by 90 degrees.

Gears
Gears are important components of mechanisms with spinning parts. There are many types of gears, but the basic idea is always the same: a rotating toothed mechanical part engages with a matching toothed mechanical part to transmit motion. In simpler terms, when the teeth of two gears are interlocked, you can turn one by turning the other. Gears transmit and transform rotational motion. By connecting gears of different sizes or at different angles or in a series; you can accomplish a great deal.
Reversing the Direction In a simple gear series, called a gear train, like the one in the diagram, turning one gear sends the other turning in the opposite direction. Want to keep things moving in the same direction as the first gear? Simple: add a third gear for the second gear to spin every other gear in a gear train spins in the same direction. Changing the speed By connecting two gears of different sizes, you can change the speed at which

the second wheel turns. For instance, if a bigger gear had 60 teeth and a smaller gear had 30 teeth, the smaller one would go around twice for every rotation of the larger one. That means the 30-tooth gear spins twice as fast as the 60-tooth gear. These speed differences are called gear ratios. In this example, the gear ratio is 1:2. If a set of gears were 90 teeth and 30 teeth, the ratio would be 1:3, meaning the smaller gear would spin around three times as fast as the larger one. Want to make sure two wheels are spinning at exactly the same time? Connect them both to the same gear system and use the same gear ratio for each.
Changing the Axis But what if you need to change the axis of the rotation? No problem. By using a

bevel gear, you can change the plane of the rotation by 90 degrees.

Amazing Innovations
Did you know that Leonardo invented an automobile and a robot? He was hundreds of years before his time. Leonardos wind-up car could be steered with a rudder-like front wheel. He didnt intend it for long-distance travel its small and doesnt have a seat. It may have been used as a prop at a feast or a pageant hosted by the Duke of Milan. The robotic knight Leonardo designed was programmed though cranks, gears, screws and pulleys to make various human-like gestures.

Activity
During the Renaissance, engineers used many different simple machines in order to make tasks easier. As a class, discuss each of the different types of simple machines in the left-hand column. Then, on your own, draw a line that matches the simple machine to a device that follows the same principles.

Simple Machine
Wedge Screw Pulley Lever Wheel and Axle Inclined Plane Spring Gears

Device
Electric Fan Staircase Inline Skates Window Blinds Spatula Rowboat Oar Windup Clock Archers Bow

Now, find a modern-day example of your own for each of these simple machines.

flight
The Dream of Flying
Throughout his life, Leonardo was interested in flight, but in his day, flying men were only the stuff of legends and myths. But not for lack of trying. The ancient Chinese knew a great deal about kite-flying, as did the ancient Romans. So there wasnt a problem with getting something up in the air. The question was how to get a human in the air, and then how to give him control of the height, distance and path of his flight. Leonardo was not alone in his quest to fly. Dreamers and inventors had been designing and building flying contraptions unsuccessfully for some time. One of the most famous legends from ancient Greece, in fact, was the story of an ingenious inventor, Daedalus, who made two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers so that he and his son could escape from a tower. The son, Icarus, soared too close to the sun and his wings melted, plunging him to the sea. Daedalus flew lower and made it to safety and freedom. In fiction, men could fly. They just needed the right invention to make it a reality.
Model of Leonardos Glider

Below: Model and original sketch of Leonardos Flapping Wing Experiment

Bird and Wings

Like the fictional Daedalus, Leonardo and those of his time looked to birds for inspiration. The idea was if you could create wings that were bird-like enough and large enough to support a humans weight, then surely you could fly. Machines of this type are called ornithopters.

In his Flying Machine study, Leonardo explored how birds wings fold. The pilot would beat the upper part of the wing up and down and the lower part in and out using an intricate system of cables attached to his feet. In his Flapping Wing Experiment, Leonardo thought that if he had been able to push down the long lever rapidly enough, the wing would have lifted the weight of a man, which is represented by the heavy plank the wing was mounted on.

At first, almost all of Leonardos flying machines were ornithopters that relied on manpower. None of them worked and Leonardo came to realize that people simply dont have the same muscle structure as birds. He needed a new approach.

the renaissance man

Leonardo observed that as much pressure is exerted by the object against the air as by the air against the body almost two centuries before Sir Isaac Newton came up with his third law of motion that for every action, there is an equal, but opposite, reaction.

Model of Leonardos Parachute

Gliding and Wind

After his early failures, Leonardo looked seriously at wind and aerodynamics, rather than manpower, to keep humans aloft. His studies led him to create a series of gliders. The first recorded, sustained and stable flight on a glider was not achieved until the early 1890s by Otto Lilienthal hundreds of years after Leonardo. But a glider based on Leonardos wing designs was made for a BBC-TV special in 2003. It created more than enough lift to carry the pilot a considerable distance.

Look Familiar?
The Airscrew is one of Leonardos most famous designs because it seems to be an ancestor of the helicopter. The craft would be operated by four men, who, by quickly rotating the center shaft, could lift themselves off the ground. It is clear that the mechanism could never have taken off, but it does get one scientific principle right: when the air is compressed it has density, and that is part of what gives helicopters their lift.

Leonardos Parachute
In 1485, Leonardo came up with a design for the first fit-for-human-use parachute, but didnt test it (for a few obvious reasons). In the year 2000, British parachutist Adrian Nicholas tested the design, which calls for a fabric pyramid attached to a wood frame. Fearing that he might get hit by the frame on impact when landing, he made the first 7,000 feet of the journey after jumping from a hot-air balloon using Leonardos design. He then cut himself loose and floated the remaining 3,000 feet to the ground using a modern parachute. In 2008, Swiss adventurer Olivier ViettiTeppa made a complete 2,000-foot trip from a helicopter to earth using Leonardos design but omitted the possibly dangerous frame from his chute.

Model and original sketch of Leonardos Airscrew

Activity
You can design and test parachutes of your own by using hard-boiled eggs as passengers. Your goal is to create a design that can carry an egg safely to the ground when dropped from the top of a ladder. You may work in groups and may use any materials you wish. Before showing the class, do at least five trials (or as many as you need to get your design to work). Record what materials you used, and what improvements you made after each trial. Demonstrate your invention to the class.

leonardos art
Becoming a Master
In Leonardos time, young people who wanted to be artists studied within a formal system of apprenticeship. When an apprentice first started training with a master artist, hed do basic, low-level tasks, such as sweeping, running errands, and grinding up and mixing the ingredients for paints. Eventually, hed begin to learn from the master by copying paintings, casting sculptures and drawing sketches. The best students would be allowed to help the master by painting backgrounds and lesser figures while the artist focused on the main subject. The best of the best would become masters themselves and would be allowed to open a studio and hire apprentices of their own. There is a famous story about Leonardo and his apprenticeship, which may be more symbolic than fact, but is still revealing. While Leonardo was the apprentice of the renowned and accomplished master Andrea del Verrocchio, he painted an angel in the bottom left part of a work called The Baptism of Christ. Leonardos out-of-the-way angel is the best thing in the painting. As the story goes, when Andrea del Verrocchio saw Leonardos angel, he put down his paintbrush forever he knew his pupil was better than he was.

Mona Lisa
Leonardos portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, known as La Gioconda or the Mona Lisa, may be the best-known painting in the world. Theres much to admire in the execution of the details in the painting: the folds of the fabric, the delicate veil and the embroidery on her dress. The composition and the use of light draw the viewers focus right to her face. But the most famous part of the painting is Lisa del Giocondos mysterious expression. Today, about 6 million people a year visit the Mona Lisa in its climate-controlled, bullet-proof-glass home in The Louvre museum in Paris, France. All are hoping to figure out what her secret is. What do you think shes thinking about?

Leonardos sketch of horse and rider

Leonardos Mona Lisa

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Leonardos The Last Supper

Activity
The Renaissance aesthetic or style was to make the subjects of paintings look as real as possible. One of the ways of accomplishing this was to create a sense of depth, making the objects in pictures appear as if they were threedimensional, rather than flat. Leonardo used his mastery of linear perspective when he painted The Last Supper. Notice the ceiling and walls in the picture. By making all of the lines that would be parallel in real life diagonal in varying degrees (except in the center of the ceiling), Leonardo gives the viewer the sense that the table is closer than the back wall, and that the landscape outside is far away. Also notice that the men on the outside right and left appear to be farther away than Jesus, the figure at the center of the painting, as if the viewer were standing in front of the middle of the table. This is accomplished by creating a vanishing point in the horizon where all the lines that are parallel in real life would appear to meet if they continued. These visual rays are called orthogonal lines. Look at these two examples. One shows the perspective from the center of a sidewalk and the other from the right side. Which is which? Look at The Last Supper again. Can you figure out what the vanishing point is in the painting?

The Last Supper

When Leonardo painted The Last Supper on the wall of the dining hall at the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie, he took great pains to make sure that each of the faces reflected a distinct and strong emotion. The painting at the Milan church is meant to portray the exact moment in the life of Jesus when he reveals that one of his must trusted friends will betray him. Instead of showing 12 shocked and dismayed people staring at Jesus, Leonardo portrayed the scene as an interlocking group made up of four sets of three people each. Each of these little groups has a dynamic of its own. The interplay and body language are fascinating, as are the little telling details (notice

how the betrayer Judas, who is turned away from the viewer, has knocked over the salt in his surprise).

The Da Vinci Code

Leonardo has been famous for more than 500 years, but he got an extra boost of star power when some of his works were featured prominently in Dan Browns best selling book The Da Vinci Code and the movie based on it. The book uses some cleverly mixed facts and fiction about Leonardos works to create tricky puzzles and mysteries for the characters (and readers) to solve. Its important to remember that the story is made up to be dramatic and entertaining. If you want to learn more about the real Leonardo, stick to history.

water
Innovations with Water
Water is useful stuff. Aside from being necessary for drinking, washing and growing crops, it can be used for transportation and even generating energy. Leonardo da Vinci explored different types of travel via water, defenses and weapons for military vessels and ways humans could better explore and move over water without boats. Leonardo the mechanical engineer also invented an automatic saw that used hydraulic power for energy.

Model of Leonardos Double-Hull Boat

Building Better Boats

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He didnt have an airplane, though Leonardo was working on that. Boats were a solid Renaissance way to travel long distances. Many of Europes kingdoms also had impressive navies for war and battles against each other. To protect boats, Leonardo invented a double hull for boats that gave the sides

and bottom two layers of protection. This defense system was a particularly good protection against ramming. The idea was that even if an enemys boat hit the side of the double-hull boat, it still wouldnt sink. When designing the hull of his agile paddleboat, Leonardo considered the shape of fish, much as he considered birds in his design of aircrafts. The boats large paddles would have been worked by hand

or foot cranks and may have been aided by flywheels. Unlike traditional boats with oars, the design of this boat allowed rowers to face forward and see where they were heading. For naval warfare, Leonardo made plans to equip special boats with revolving platforms on which lines of cannons could be positioned or a large square mortar from which projectiles could be fired.

the renaissance Man

Leonardo noted, correctly, that water leaving through a narrow channel, blood traveling through the heart and air blown through a narrow space all swirl in similar ways.

Model of Leonardos Naval Cannon

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Model of Leonardos Leather Lifesaver

and a diving mask with rings to protect against uneven pressure. Diving masks to remain underwater werent new, but Leonardo tweaked the design and anticipated some features found on modern scuba gear.

Hydraulic Saw Man Overboard!

Leonardo created several inventions for personal aquatic movement. One was a set of huge swimming gloves to be worn on the hands like flippers. Another was a set of little boats to attach to your feet for walking on water (this didnt work). Other designs included an inflatable ring-shaped leather lifesaver to be used for buoyancy or emergency air in a pinch People in Leonardos times knew how to harness the power of water to create energy. Watermills, which feature large, slatted paddle wheels spun by flowing water, date back to ancient times. The wheels axle was connected to gears and cams that could be arranged to change the speed and direction of the motion until it was transformed into something useful, such as turning millstones to grind wheat into flour. Leonardos hydraulic saw worked in the same way. It featured alternating motion that transmitted motion in quick succession from the blade, which goes up and down, to a carriage that held the tree trunks. With this design, the wood was pushed forward as it was being sawed.

Model of Leonardos Hydraulic Saw

Activity
Leonardo was interested in hydrodynamics the way water moves and the way objects in water move. Design a simple experiment to test a hypothesis about the way water moves or the way an object interacts with water. Make a list of materials youll need. Create step-by-step instructions for how to conduct the experiment. Follow them. Report your results. Explain what you think the results mean in a conclusion.

Model of Leonardos Paddle Vessel

the human machine

The Renaissance Body
When Leonardo da Vinci was studying to be an artist, anatomy lessons were a huge part of the training. Artists looked at human bodies with an eye to structure, appearance and movement. Leon Battista Alberti, a renowned author, artist, architect, poet, philosopher and Renaissance man of the previous generation, advocated that artists should draw figures with the full knowledge of what they were made of bones, covered with nerves and muscles, and then flesh and skin. The trouble with that was Renaissance artists couldnt just look at books on the human skeleton, organs, veins and muscles. The powerful Catholic Church had banned the dissection of humans which means no one was allowed to cut open a corpse to see what was inside. When trying to figure out the interior anatomy of the human body, doctors and artists had to rely on tradition, assumptions and observations that could be made on the surface of the body. They also tried to draw conclusions about human bodies from animal dissections.

Leonardos sketches of human exteriors and animal interiors

Looking Inside
Leonardos sketch The Foetus in the Womb

the renaissance man

It is nobler to imitate things in nature, which are in fact the real images, than to imitate in words, the words and deeds of man. Leonardo

Leonardos early anatomical drawings reflect traditional (and often wrong) notions about the body, such as the idea that breast milk is created by the mother in her womb, and that the brain is divided into three linked parts, each behind the other one that perceives whats going on, one that processes whats going on and one that stores that knowledge. Later, Leonardo was able to make extensive studies of actual dissected human corpses (it seems he was given permission by a few hospitals though the Church ban was still in place). He set aside the antiquated ideas found in the textbooks and meticulously drew what he saw. His drawings were highly detailed and remained the most precise anatomical drawings for hundreds of years. And, being from the hand of a master artist, they were beautiful, too.

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Leonardo Teaches Surgeon 500 Years Later

Francis Wells, a modern-day British heart surgeon, was looking at some of Leonardos drawings and notes when he made an incredible realization. He was admiring Leonardos intricate studies of the way heart valves open and close, and how the blood flows within the heart when he realized how he could better repair his patients heart valves. Up until Wells discovery, doctors fixed faulty mitral valves which control the direction of blood flow by narrowing the diameter of the valves, which in turn limited blood flow. Though it worked, it restricted how much exercise patients could tolerate afterward. Wells observed that Leonardo had noted that the shape of the valve itself was an important factor in how it worked. With this in mind, Wells changed his technique. After his style of mitral valve surgery, Wells patients have reported dramatic improvements.
Vitruvian Man Many Renaissance artists tried to solve a mystery left behind by the ancient Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius. Vitruvius said that if you drew a figure of a person within a circle and a square, the center of the body would be the navel (belly button). The problem is that when you put the square perfectly inside the circle, in order to make the navel-centered person fit, you need to draw the arms and legs unnaturally stretched-out in order to touch the sides. Leonardo solved the riddle by offsetting the two shapes and making the navel the center of the circle only. His Vitruvian Man, which appears on the cover of this special section, is one of the most famous drawings in the world.

Leonardos Vitruvian Man

Activity
Renaissance doctors didnt have x-rays or MRIs or any other way to see what was going on inside their patients. They had to rely on surface observations and unreliable texts. Lucky for you, doctors today have hundreds of years of anatomical studies at their disposal. Take advantage of that fact and explore the anatomy of your hand. Trace the outline of your hand twice. Then, using reliable resources, draw and label the bones and ligaments in the first outline. Then draw and label the muscles and tendons in the second outline.

war and weapons

Leonardos Predicament
Leonardo da Vinci loved life and respected it. However, he lived in a time when wars, invasions and battles between kingdoms, duchies and principalities were commonplace across Europe. Building innovative weaponry was lucrative, and its how Leonardo got his job with his patron, Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. In his letter seeking patronage, he billed himself as a formidable military engineer, and only mentioned in passing that he also happened to be a great artist. At first, Leonardo worked mostly as a kind of defense contractor, designing handy, smart and sometimes cruelly effective weapons.

Model of Leonardos Scythe Machine

One was a gruesome war machine propelled by horses that featured long scythes, the type of blade that is used to cut wheat in the field. You may have seen one in a depiction of the Grim Reaper. In Leonardos design, the scythes rotated in a huge circle and would mow down anything or anyone in its range. Leonardo didnt invent this type of machine, which was ancient in design, but he did make it more efficient, and gave the warning that such weapons often wreak as much havoc on friends as on foes.

He also created missiles, multi-barreled machine guns, grenades, mortars and a modern-style tank. Years later, the artist wrote about his abhorrence of war, the inherent violence of men and what he saw as the eventual result of war: By their strong limbs we shall see a great portion of the trees of vast forests laid low throughout the universe nothing will remain on the earth, or under the earth, or in the waters.

the renaissance man

For at least a part of his life, Leonardo was a vegetarian and a great lover of animals. He was known to buy caged birds simply to set them free. He also was a talented musician. He sang well and played the lyre (a stringed instrument in the same family as the guitar).

Model of Leonardos Vessel with Scythe

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Models of Leonardos Ogival Cannon Balls

Model of Leonardos Mobile Bridge

Mistakes on Purpose?
Some of Leonardos designs have obvious flaws in them. For instance, in a design he created for an armored vehicle, he arranged the gears in such a way that the wheels would roll in opposite directions it would have gotten nowhere. Its very likely that Leonardo created these flaws on purpose. But why? One theory is that he was preventing others from copying his secret designs. Some scholars, however, have suggested a stronger reason. Since Leonardo was a man who loved peace but worked for a warlord, these

scholars argue that he created the flaws to ensure that his designs couldnt be used to hurt people.

Bridges
Leonardo designed a few different types of bridges that could be built quickly with materials that were easy to find and to transport (small tree trunks and strong ropes) for military purposes. Since these bridges made crossing rivers possible, troops who used them could make fast and unexpected movements, catching the enemy unawares. Modern pontoon bridges were inspired by Leonardos design.

Projectiles
The study of ballistics is important if you want to make the shots you fire hit the target. By experimenting with jets of water, Leonardo figured out how air affects the trajectory, or path, of cannon balls. He designed projectiles that are incredibly modern with aerodynamic shapes and directional wings.

Activity
Model of Leonardos Catapult

Credits:

The educational supplement Leonardo da Vinci: Man, Inventor, Genius was commissioned from Hollister Kids for Detroit Newspapers In Education. Copyright 2008 Detroit Newspapers LLC. All rights reserved. Support for this program was provided by the Detroit Science Center. The writer was Martha Michaela Brown. The graphic designer was Heidi Karl. The editor was Peter Landry. The manager of Detroit Newspapers In Education is Sharon Martin.

Leonardo designed his own version of the catapult, which is one of the worlds oldest war machines. The basic idea of a catapult is that a projectile is rested on one end of a lever in which tension is stored. When that tension is released, the lever flips up and the projectile is sent flying. The tension can be created by pulling back a springy lever or by the use of counterweights. Try making a catapult of your own, using only one thick rubber band; a flexible, but sturdy plastic spoon; and a soup can to propel a marshmallow. Through trial and error, figure out the best way and the best angle to attach the spoon to the soup can to get the maximum distance out of a marshmallow launch. Hold a class competition.

thank you

Thank you Detroit Science Center for supporting Newspapers In Education.