The Genius of Leonardo Da Vinci

There's no doubt that Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius of the highest caliber. Today, however, he is known mainly as a painter, and he did paint some of the more famous early paintings, including the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. But he was also a master engineer, an inventor, and a scientist with an incredible curiosity about nature. His studies spanned several areas including physics, astronomy, mathematics, optics, hydrodynamics, chemistry and anatomy, yet he had little formal education.
     Among his most imaginative inventions were his contributions to the military. Despite these contributions he was not a war-monger. In fact, he hated war so much he could not kill even small animals. But it seemed to be the only way for him to make a decent living, and he finally accepted it. And as it turned out, his war inventions were years ahead of his time. He designed an armored tank, a machine gun, a parachute, and various types of flying machines including a glider. None of his inventions, however, were built during his lifetime because he kept his drawings secret, and they were not discovered for over a hundred years after he died.
     One of his major interests was manned flight and he spent hundreds of hours watching and studying birds in flight. He invented a device that he hoped would allow humans to soar through the sky like birds, and there is some evidence that he actually tried to build and test it. In particular, he noticed the similarity between the flow of water around objects of various sizes and shapes to the flow of air around similar objects. He made a detailed study of the dynamics of turbulent flow.