THE LIFE OF A GENIUS PART 2

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Scholars from all over the world studied this universal character.  Although he was born in a little village near a little Tuscan town of Vinci Milan seems to be considering him as its greatest master.

 Just as much as he was an artist he did architecture, city planning, and he was also an inventor. He designed artillery and hydraulic engineering and he was the forerunner for aerodynamic flight.

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All Leonardo’s materials had been assembled but just before Italy entered the war everything that was assembled was scattered to the four winds of the earth.

The reconstructed machines, the models according to Leonardo’s drawings were prepared as models. All the photographic reproductions and all the sciences  everything that Milan wanted to put into a museum of him either found their way abroad or they were packed into warehouses to decay there.

All the scholars could do was to work from documentations that was found of original documents  that is how this book came together. Everything that was found was drawings of his and these led to vivid pictures not only of the Italian Renaissance but that of human culture.

I am now starting, maybe the wrong way round but most of us know and love his paintings, so I am starting with codex of the flight. Most interesting the studies made by Leonardo on the lifting of power is of great interest. Leonardo sensed the principle of “aerodynamic reciprocity” was enunciated two centuries later by Newton.

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As much pressure is exerted by an object against the air as by the air against the body. He said if a man has a tent made of linen, his construction details reads like this “If a man have a tent made of linen of which the apertures have all been stopped up, and it is twelve ells across and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any great height without sustaining any injury”.

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That sounds like a paratrooper’s solution to me.  He’s aerial screw project dates from the same period, this asserts the aerodynamic possibilities of air when set in rapid rotation, and with it we have arrived at the principle on which airplane propeller is based.

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 In 1499, was the last stay of him in Milan, and he suspended his research on flight while he was wondering to Florence and Rome, but took it up again in 1503 -1506 at Fiesole.