What Were Leonardo da Vinci's Inventions? From Flying Machines to the Tank

Dear readers, today we are telling the story of just how great an engineer a certain painter really was. Mention Leonardo da Vinci and the first things that come to mind are the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper. Yet his real legacy is hidden in the notebooks that laid the foundations of what we now call mechanical engineering some 500 years early. Anyone who researches da Vinci’s machines and inventions finds a genuine Renaissance engineer in front of them.

A Passion for the Sky: Flying Machines

Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines are among his best-known works. After watching birds and bats for hours on end, da Vinci drew on those observations to design a craft he called the “ornithopter”, which aimed to fly by flapping its wings. With a wingspan of roughly 10 metres, the machine was to be built from pine covered in raw silk and powered by the pilot’s arms and legs.

Ornithopter and aerial screw drawings from the Codex Atlanticus

The “aerial screw” he drew in the same period is regarded as the ancestor of today’s helicopter. This spiral-shaped device was meant to rise by “drilling” through the air like a screw. In 2022 an engineering team from the University of Maryland actually managed to fly the design at small scale. Da Vinci’s parachute design showed similar foresight, built around a pyramid-shaped wooden frame, and centuries later it was tested and proved to work.

crimson spin — **The University of Maryland’s aerial screw prototype, named “Crimson Spin”**.

A Dream of the Battlefield: The Armoured Fighting Vehicle

Leonardo da Vinci’s tank design grew out of a letter he prepared in 1487 for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Cone-shaped and reminiscent of a tortoise shell, the vehicle was to be clad in wood and metal plates and able to fire in every direction from cannons placed around its rim. Four men inside would move it by turning a crank mechanism.

There is an intriguing detail. In the original drawings the gears are arranged the wrong way round, so the vehicle would not have worked had it been built exactly as drawn. Some historians think this was a deliberate safeguard: da Vinci may have wanted his designs to be useless in the wrong hands if they were ever stolen.

The Self-Propelled Cart

The Mechanical Knight: The First Idea of a Robot

The mechanical knight, known as Leonardo da Vinci’s robot design, was the idea of a human-shaped automaton built into a suit of armour with a system of pulleys and cables, able to sit down, move its arms and even open and close its jaw. Looking at the history of robotics, this design is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the humanoid robot concept.

The Diving Suit and Underwater Ideas

Da Vinci designed a leather diving suit so that divers could approach enemy ships unseen from below during naval battles. Allowing the wearer to breathe through air tubes connected to a float on the surface, the system is considered a distant ancestor of today’s diving equipment.

So Why Was None of It Built at the Time?

The answer is actually quite simple. Anyone looking into why Leonardo da Vinci’s machines did not work generally runs into two basic obstacles. The first is that the materials of the era (wood, leather, simple metals) could not deliver the balance of lightness and strength these designs demanded. The second is that a powerful, compact source of energy had not yet been invented. Da Vinci’s ideas were the product of a mind living far ahead of the technology around it.

The Influence That Reaches Us Today

Da Vinci’s drawings are still studied in engineering faculties today. Igor Sikorsky said himself that he drew inspiration from da Vinci’s aerial screw drawing while developing the first practical helicopter in the 1920s. In Rome, in Milan and in museums around the world, working models built from these drawings are on display. That goes some way to explaining why the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s machines still attracts so much curiosity.

Frequently Asked Questions

An exact figure is hard to give, because his notebooks contain thousands of pages of drawings and notes. Dozens of original machine designs have been identified, however, including flying machines, war vehicles, hydraulic systems and automata.

None of them was fully built and tested in his lifetime. Modern engineers, however, have rebuilt designs such as the aerial screw, the parachute and the self-propelled cart with contemporary materials and proved that they work.

The original design never flew, because reaching the necessary rotational speed with human power was impossible. In 2022 the University of Maryland’s small-scale powered prototype achieved short flights.

Most of the drawings are part of the compilation known as the Codex Atlanticus, held at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Other notes are scattered across Windsor Castle and various museums.