To imagine the era of Leonardo da Vinci, you must first imagine a world without helicopters, parachutes, tanks, diving suits, robots, etc. However, all of these things existed for Leonardo himself, or rather, in his imagination. What he didn’t build in real life, he recorded in his notebook, leaving behind material for an assessment of his genius that continues 50 years later. One such thank you can be seen in the new video above. lost in timerenders his inventions using a type of 3D animation technique that even the exemplary Renaissance man could not have foreseen.
This helps us see Leonardo’s work from the point of view of his contemporaries, and gives us a sense of how surprised they would have been if they had encountered a seated knight who stood up, opened his visor, and revealed that there was no one in his armor. This kind of thing may even amuse us here in the 21st century, but we who are used to seeing machines move around under their own power, and now we see them every day in a more believable human form, do not want to believe that it is some kind of life force.
But in the 1490s, people knew about manpower and instinctively looked for it. Leonardo also figured out that most of his inventions utilized human muscles, and by studying their inner workings he was able to make the gears and pulleys of his “robot” knights move realistically.
According to a plan written in one of Leonardo’s notebooks, his “aerial screw” would involve wrapping a linen sail around a wooden mast and having four men run in a circle around a rotating platform, which would theoretically rotate and lift the entire device into the air. Had it been designed, it would not have been able to take off, but in 2019 scientists at the University of Maryland modified it to function normally as a small drone. As the video shows, this is not the only Leonardo invention that his intelligent descendants tried on their own that did not come to fruition. No one seems to have yet attempted to build his 80-foot-wide crossbow, which required the efforts of 12 soldiers to use on the battlefield, but it was probably all for the better.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. His projects include the Substack newsletter books about cities and a book Stateless City: A Stroll Through Los Angeles in the 21st Century. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
