Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo designed a helicopter in 1489. He called it an aerial screw. He drew it in a notebook, in mirror script — he wrote right-to-left, as a privacy measure and because he was left-handed and didn’t want to smear his own ink — and the drawing is precise enough that modern engineers have built working models from it. It doesn’t fly well. Leonardo knew it wouldn’t. He wrote, beside the sketch: “A man with wings large enough and duly connected might learn to overcome the resistance of the air.” He understood the problem was power-to-weight ratio. He lacked, in 1489, any engine capable of solving it. So he drew the shape of the machine that would solve it, four centuries before the machine existed.
He did this over and over. A diving suit with a floating air-bladder on the surface. An armored fighting vehicle — essentially a tank — with cranks to turn the wheels. An automated loom that would have mechanized textile production three hundred years before the Industrial Revolution. A self-supporting bridge for the Sultan of Ottoman — which Leonardo bid for, lost, and which Norwegian engineers built in 2001 based on his drawings. It worked.
The pattern is always the same. He’d see a problem — a river, a flight, a siege — and instead of solving the version of it that was solvable with 1490s tools, he’d solve the version that would be solvable, someday. He was patient with the future in a way that exhausted everyone around him. His patrons wanted statues. He wanted to design the ideal city, with traffic on multiple levels separated by function, canals for waste disposal, and buildings oriented to prevailing winds. He sketched it. Nobody built it. Urban planners in the 20th century began to.
Talk to him and the eerie thing is what he’s not surprised by. Show him a smartphone. He’ll turn it over in his hands, assess the weight, and say something like: “Of course. What does it eat?” Show him an airplane and he’ll want to know the wing-loading calculation. He’ll find our medical imaging beautiful — he dissected thirty corpses by candlelight in a Florence morgue to draw human anatomy, and he wrote, mournfully, that “the human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” He’d consider MRI machines to be confirmation.
What would he predict now? Ask him. He’ll look at you the way he looked at the aerial screw — a long, patient, assessing look — and he’ll say: the next thing is not a new invention. The next thing is finally slowing down long enough to build the ones we already imagined. He’s been watching us, for 500 years, build about 10 percent of what he sketched. He has opinions about that.
He’s not in a hurry. He’s been ahead this whole time.
Three questions to start with:
- The aerial screw. You knew it wouldn’t fly with 1489 technology. Why did you draw it anyway?
- You left the Mona Lisa unfinished, the Last Supper half-ruined by your own experimental paint, and thirty commissioned projects incomplete. What did finishing feel like?
- Of everything you sketched that we eventually built — which one surprised you that we got to, and which one are you disappointed we still haven’t?
