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Think decoding Leonardo da Vinci is just fiction? As this ScienCentral News video explains, two men did just that with one of da Vinci's most famous ideas, a flying machine.
Fly Like a Bird
Long before the time of Leonardo da Vinci, people looked to the sky and wondered how they too could fly like a bird. But it was da Vinci who started to give form to those daydreams with notes and drawings that suggested how a machine that flies like a bird, called an ornithopter, might be built.
Da Vinci never pursued his dreams of flight. 500 years later we now know a lot more about birds and about flight, but his drawings are still there along with the question of how close did da Vinci come?
Two Seattle area men chose to finish da Vinci's work, building a full-sized flying machine. For three years retired engineer Sandy McLaughlin and retired teacher John Grove worked to make the flying machine a reality.
They were not the first to build something from the drawings, but McLaughlin decided to fill in the gaps in da Vinci's drawings. He explained that, "I just sort of thought I ought to try to do something different and came up with the idea of going beyond what Leonardo showed and to try and do what he could have done if he kept working on aviation."
As an engineer McLaughlin worked on such diverse projects as the hydrogen bomb and the first kidney dialysis machine. For this project, he first had to go through da Vinci's works. He explained, "I read a whole bunch of translations mostly from the Codex Atlanticus, which is a collection of his writings." McLaughlin added that da Vinci's interest in flight, "probably started through his observation of birds. He was intrigued by birds and did a lot of sketches of birds flying and dissected them and got their anatomy and musculature figured out."
Grove explained the trick was to view things the way da Vinci might have. "We were always conscious of trying to look at it through 16th century eyes, and put ourselves back through that perspective. The pair confined themselves to construction material that might have been available in da Vinci's time. McLaughlin explained, "There are no nuts and bolts. There's no space age fasteners or bearings or anything like that. It's all put together with rawhide lashings and dowels to hold the parts together."
Grove said getting the flapping wing structure, "was a real challenge" and that, "we were breaking things." But, he added, "We'd run into one problem and think, 'By golly, there's got to be another way to do this.' …(but that) ideas would come and it all came together." He noted that that even with da Vinci as a guide, they considered three or four different versions of how the flying machine might work.
The two men never expected this flying machine to ever actually fly. Instead, it hangs in the entry of Seattle's Museum of Flight. McLaughlin said, "It could fly as a glider, (but)…As an ornithopter, where the wings actually flap, that's pretty much impossible because man's musculature and metabolism pretty much don't agree with the requirements of flight." He said a really strong person, "might be able to flap the wings once."
But what of the idea of even trying to finish something created by Leonardo da Vinci? Grove explained, "When you walk back through those footsteps, it's really kind of a challenging thing." Added McLaughlin, "It's a little presumptuous, I guess, but we just sort of decided that's what we were going to do."
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