# Leonardo Da Vinci...really a scientist and engineer? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 29, 2005, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296 "2005-11-29T23:45:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2005, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/1 "2005-11-29T23:45:46Z")
I posted a thread about this long ago, but can’t find it now. Anyway there were no replies to it and it sank like a stone. At any rate, one often hears Leonardo described as a scientist or engineer, and my question is whether he really did anything worthwhile in those areas. Best known to the average person are his drawings of “helicopters” and other aircraft intended to fly on the beating-wing principle. While cunningly drawn and thought out, these designs look just a bit silly IMHO…I invented all sorts of things scribbling in my notebooks during middle school, only I didn’t draw them quite so well. He seemed not to have any practical understanding of the forces involved, or how much power was needed to lift an aircraft off the ground. I suppose he deserves props for being willing to tackle the problem in the first place, but beyond that I don’t really see the practical result. On the other hand, his painting output, in terms of extant work, was tiny. IIRC there are really only about a half-dozen completed paintings in existence, so he must have been doing something with the rest of hist time. Was that time spent in more successful engineering applications that we never hear about? Are there any here who care to take this issue on? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/2 "2005-11-30T00:19:36Z")
the roles of ‘scientist’, ‘engineer’ and ‘artist’ were not so crystallised back in Leonardo’s day (although I suspect if they were, he’d simply have been a misfit). Yes, he did produce some novel insights - I believe a fuull-size version of his glider has been built and flown, but a lot of what he did was just meticulous observation of _everything_; heart valves, birds in flight, fluid turbulence, etc - there really wasn’t very much he was not obsessively interested in, but a huge volume of his work, while mostly scrupulously accurate, was never pursued to its possible technological applications. There’s a tendency though, to pretend that, since he knew some remarkable things (for a man of his time), that he knew _all the secrets of the universe_. Of course this is false. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/3 "2005-11-30T01:05:06Z")
To add to **Mangetout** ’s point about roles not being so well defined in the period, there was an existing tradition in Italy of people who we would now classify as artists or architects also working on projects we would now classify as engineering. Brunelleschi’s the obvious example, but there were others. On useful criterion for judging whether Leonardo was a serious engineer is whether he was paid for it. And he undoubtedly was. It was a major feature of his career that he was forever being consulted by his courtly patrons on issues like the design of fortifications, with appropriate reward. At some times and in some places this was what he spent most of his time doing. By the standards of his contemporaries, he was a hot-shot consultant to get advice from. The more awkward question is how useful all this advice was. Or, put another way, how many of the schemes he doodled in the notebooks ever saw the light of day. Offhand, I can’t think of any, though I’d expect there to be at least a few cases where it can be shown that particular designs were implemented at the time. One project that was started, with the backing of Machiavelli, was a canal to divert the Arno away from Pisa during the 1504 siege of the city by the Florentines. That failed, but the scale of the ambition involved in the project shows the degree to which he was taken seriously on such matters by those in power. In the pure sciences, the major significant factor to be considered is that he published virtually nothing. He’s thus a very interesting thinker and insightful observer who had relatively little impact on the development of science. The obvious example here are the anatomical drawings. By the standards of the time, these are extraordinary and would have been a major advance if published. It’s not even as if they were particularly secret: late in life he showed them to visitors and others saw them in the years immediately after his death. The result was that at least some contemporaries recognised the extent of his achievement. However the drawings themselves mainly remained out of circulation in private hands and so, despite their reputation, weren’t published until a few centuries later. Even just a few years after his death, Vesalius had published his own anatomical studies and the field had begun to move beyond what Leonardo had achieved. It’s the same, to a lesser extent, with his notes on topics like mechanics. Substantial for the time, but of limited influence because they weren’t published until much later. Incidentally, the old suggestion - mainly on the basis of one ambiguous notebook jotting - that Leonardo anticipated Copernicus in coming up with heliocentrism is no longer taken seriously by historians of science. Sir Martin Kemp’s _Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man_ (Dent, 1981) is recommended as a book concentrating on him as a scientist and engineer. ---
**Author:** ![capybara](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/capybara/32/202_2.png) [@capybara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/capybara)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/4 "2005-11-30T01:52:52Z")
It’s a riot to read his, basically, job application to Lodovico Sforza back in the 1470s-- basically “I can make great siege weapons, have improved other weapons in this and that manner, I can design really good bridges for troop deployment, I can design great fortification and anti-siege devices, I understand ballistics and can cast good cannon, I know how to design good strong ships and armoroed vehicles blah blah blah and like in point#37"Oh, and I can paint ok, too, if you need me to. Oh, in addition to cannons I can cast sculpture as well.” Man knew his market at court. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/5 "2005-11-30T02:53:45Z")
> [@](#): > > On useful criterion for judging whether Leonardo was a serious engineer is whether he was paid for it. And he undoubtedly was. But in his era, a lot of alchemists were making a good living. That didn’t make them scientists just convincing salesmen. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/6 "2005-11-30T03:25:07Z")
> [@Little Nemo](#): > > But in his era, a lot of alchemists were making a good living. That didn’t make them scientists just convincing salesmen. So what? If someone were making a good living as an alchemist, then surely that’s a plausible reason, from a 21st century perspective, for regarding them as having been an alchemist by the standards of the time? Whether what they were doing was effective in the light of later knowledge, other than as a means of maintaining that reputation and pulling in cash, is irrelevant. Furthermore, my previous post goes on to explicitly raise the question of whether Leonardo’s engineering advice was useful. As far as I can tell, you’re trying to raise a distinction that had already been covered. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/7 "2005-11-30T03:57:13Z")
There was [an excellent BBC documentary](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002CH7HA/qid=1133322972/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/202-3260495-4102217) that chronicled his life recently, including the building of many of the items he designed to see if they’d really work, and they all did. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/8 "2005-11-30T04:21:56Z")
> [@Little Nemo](#): > > But in his era, a lot of alchemists were making a good living. That didn’t make them scientists just convincing salesmen. Alchemists performed some useful services, like compounding drugs–they were your go-to guys for anything having to do with what passed for chemistry at the time. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/9 "2005-11-30T12:50:51Z")
The recent BBC documentary (which aired on American PBS) was interesting in that it showed that da Vinci plotted things down to very fine detail;s. For my money, he was definitely an engineer. I’ve worked my way through the Dover edition of his notebooks. He was a careful and detailed observer, who correctly noted the color of smoke and extrapolated to the real cause of blue sky. His notes on optics and perspective go on longer than Euclid’s and cover pretty much the same ground. His notes on the human body seem to be based on real observation and dissection. As the BBC special noted, he was aware of the circulation of the blood , judging from his notes, well before Harvey and the general understanding of it in European science. Observation and extrapolation – he was a scientist. A lot of his stuff was amazingly prescient – parachutes, tanks, new methods of casting. Some of it, I’m convinced, wouldn’t work – I’ve read in a number of places that his _helixpteron_, his “helicopter”, only needed a motor to work. But I think it would never have gotten off the ground, motor or not – but in the main he was a brilliant and inspired artist, scientist, and engineer. ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/10 "2005-11-30T13:34:59Z")
It appears that he invented plastic, too! I’d say that qualifies him as a scientist and chemical engineer. [http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1038668.htm](http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1038668.htm) ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2005, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/leonardo-da-vinci-really-a-scientist-and-engineer/333296/11 "2005-11-30T13:45:51Z")
> [@Qadgop the Mercotan](#): > > It appears that he invented plastic, too! Mr. McGuire: I want to say two words to you. Just two words. Benjamin: Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Benjamin: Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire: Ox tripe.