The Dream of Flight - Page 3

The inspiration behind Leonardo's flying machine designs

In [68 Scorpion, Part One], it is Kathryn Janeway (known to Holo-Leonardo as Catarina) who gives the Maestro the inspiration to reconsider the way he looks at designing flying machines. She tells him: "It's this flapping approach. You designed your machine to mimic the way a bat or a sparrow flies. So what if you based it on the hawk instead?" Holo-Leonardo realises: "The hawk - a creature that glides through the air." With that he grants her permission to use his workshop, and tells her she will help him design the flying machine.

As regards the real Leonardo, we have no firm knowledge. Indeed, sources offer two conflicting views, and it may be that one or other or a mix of both was the case, but the truth is that no one knows. I have no view one way or the other and anyway dare not unless or until I can read all of the relevant parts of the Codex Atlanticus for myself which cannot occur unless someone fully publishes it (and translates it into English) (see source note below). The two conflicting views are, in no particular order, with myself voicing each view in my own words:

• Summary: Leonardo studied nature and especially birds and their manner of flight in-depth, in the hope that correctly emulating birds or adapting their flight mechanics would produce a viable flying machine.

  In many projects, Leonardo looked to nature as a source of inspiration for the mechanics of his inventions. I can produce the following in possible support of that: in [79 Concerning Flight], Holo-Leonardo tells Janeway, who is known as Catarina to him: Catarina, observe the construction, like the veins and arteries of a great animal. Now this is the way to build, using nature as your guide." It is not surprising therefore that Leonardo felt he could develop a successful flying machine based on the flight method and aerodynamics of birds. He also looked at other animals, including bats. Leonardo's numerous notes regarding the laws and rationale of the flight of birds, are scattered through several of his notebooks. Most are gathered in what is known as the Codex On The Flight Of Birds. I quote the passages which deal with the construction of a flying machine, because they are passages in which the phenomena of bird flight is expressly connected with the idea of a flying machine.

  Below: Leonardo's notes on flight from his notes, the ones not in the Codex Atlanticus:
  

  Source note about the above: The long passage which I quote above appears (it is actually two consecutive passages) as they appear in Richter's collection published in 1883 of all Leonardo's literary works as at the date of his compilation, though Richter notes that these passages had already been published in Milan in 1872 in "Saggio delle opere di Leonardo da Vinci". Quotations from Leonardo are from the Codex Atlanticus but I have not read it save for a few excerpts provided in books etc. The full text of it is not available except as follows. The Codex Atlanticus, being a collection of more than a thousand sheets of the scientific and technical drawings, were gathered together at the end of the 16th century by Pompeo Leoni, a sculptor. Leoni was trying to organise Leonardo's work into categories, cutting and pasting drawings from original notebooks on to the atlas-sized pages that give the Codex Atlanticus its name. Some drawings were damaged in the process and others lost. The Codex was appropriated by Napoleon Bonaparte (later Emperor Napoleon I) at the end of the 18th century during his reign's looting of art works in Europe. The Codex was returned from Paris to Milan in the mid-19th century. Early photographers captured images of the sheets on large glass plates, and these formed the basis of a reproduction in 1906 of the entire Codex. The original sheets were poorly restored in the 1950s and the early photographs are more valuable to historians than the original sheets. Copies of the 1906 edition (comprising a collaboration between the Accademia dei Lincei, Italy's national academy, and the publisher Anthelios) are now very rare, but an exhibition of part started on worldwide tour in 2006.

  Leonardo also examined the flight principles of insects e.g. a dragonfly. In Leonardo's drawing is the front view a beetle (order Coleoptera), and below it is an antbird (family Formicariidae). The latter differs from a dragonfly in its shorter body and longer antenae. The sketch at the top is dated around 1480, that at the bottom around 1503-05. Pen on fragments of red, prepared paper, trimmed and stuck on a sheet of the same colour, 12.9 x 11.8 cm, Royal Library, Turin, Italy.

• Summary: Leonardo did not look mainly toward nature for his theories and design inspiration, but to his studies of human body dynamics in relation to weights and pressures.

  Whilst not losing sight of the theme of the imitation of natural flight such as bird flight, Leonardo derived his theories and designs mainly from his attempts always to harness the dynamic potential of the human body as efficiently as possible and whenever possible (for labour-saving machinery, for instance). Toward that end, he invested substantial time in observation and experimentation in respect of weights and pressures, especially in connection with the examination of the proportion and movement of the human body. His in-depth anatomical studies contributed to this, whereby the dissection of human corpses enabled him to work out how muscles and tendons worked together.

  Against the first view, it seems probable that the idea which led him to investigate flight mechanisms in birds and insects was the constant theme of wanting to construct a flying or aerial machine for man, but that is supposition because the notes on the two subjects are unconnected in the manuscripts, and those on the flight of birds are by far the most numerous and extensive. The quotation given above (the one which includes the drawing of the parachute at the end) is, moreover, the only passage (actually two consecutive passages) which link animals (birds and bats) with manned flight.

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