Undoubtedly one of the most brilliant minds that ever walked on earth was Leonardo Da Vinci. His intellect was far ahead of his time, and it was evident from his ‘war machine’ sketches, which took ages to develop after his time. Although his hypothesis and inventions were improvised by many, his paintings still stand the ravages of time, none able to ever replicate his mastery. The legend who gained the simple pleasures of life in trying to understand the intricate the details had once quoted
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=””]“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”[/box]
strove his life by learning constantly. Let us take a moment to know more about the master’s life and the quotes that we can apply in our lives !
- Leonardo Da Vinci was dyslexic, ambidextrous and predominantly left handed. As a child he was very smart and was very quick at arithmetic and music. He learned the lyre and had a wonderful singing voice, and quickly went to further develop his talents with a tutor.
- He started to use his science to enhance his paintings. During his apprenticeship with Andrea del Verrochio, in Florence, who was an artist, skilled craftsmen, goldsmith, sculptor and painter; he started to find his niche at inventing machines like the helicopter, diving suit, and submarine 500 years ahead of time.
- The fame of Da Vinci’s surviving paintings has meant that he has been regarded primarily as an artist, but the thousands of surviving pages of his notebooks reveal the most eclectic and brilliant of minds. He wrote and drew on subjects including geology, anatomy (which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately), flight, gravity and optics, often flitting from subject to subject on a single page, and writing in left-handed mirror script.
- If all this work had been published in an intelligible form, da Vinci’s place as a pioneering scientist would have been beyond dispute. Yet his true genius was not as a scientist or an artist, but as a combination of the two: an ‘artist-engineer’. His painting was scientific, based on a deep understanding of the workings of the human body and the physics of light and shade. His science was expressed through art, and his drawings and diagrams show what he meant, and how he understood the world to work.
- He had a great variety of jobs including designing artillery and planning river system diversions for the city. At the time he had even thought of more efficient ways of bridge building by developing light, strong, and effective bridges, and ways to destroy such bridges. This is really where he started to dive into the field of science and learn more and more.
- As the court engineer for a number of years, he did a fair amount of work with artillery, gunpowder, and fighting machines. He invented multi-barreled guns and even steam-powered ones. He saw them as a way to study the physics of objects moving at high speeds, not as a weaponry.
- He was the first to see clearly that knowledge of science would have to come from repeated experiments done, not unproven ideas. He was also the first scientist that correlated mathematics and science. One of the reasons that he did fail in scientific investigations was because many of the mathematics laws that he needed had not yet been discovered. Another problem was that there were no accurate instruments for his measurements. Despite these holdbacks, he was thought of as a real pioneer.
His impact on society after he died is hard to determine and one of his great contributions was that he started the Scientific Revolution. Although he physically lead a simple life, the world he envisioned was truly extraordinary.
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=””]“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”[/box]
He is true embodiment of the word “Innovation” and he revolutionized the way that scientists have researched ever since !
References: leonardo-da-vinci.ch, leonardodavinci.net, bbc.co.uk
Image Credits: openclipart.org, bbc.com, taringa.net, emaze.com, canva.com
