In a blog post from six years ago on Leonardo as a “Renaissance Man,” I discussed how science represented only one facet of his many interests: painting, sculpting, botany, architecture, urban planning, public spectacle and pageantry, and music.
But Leonardo’s aviation experiments, particularly on this occasion, deserve more in-depth analysis of how they foundered—and why his failure to disseminate his ideas slowed scientific progress for the next four centuries.
It took Leonardo a few more years before he realized that human beings did not have the appropriate proportion of muscles to weight that enabled flight of the birds that long fascinated him (more than 35,000 words and 500 sketches dealing with flying machines, the nature of air, and bird flight). At that point he turned his attention to gliders.
But besides this initial failure of understanding, Leonardo was handicapped by the lack of lightweight material like aluminum or strong propulsion systems like engines that later made man-made flight possible.
Science history is filled with examples of how technology trigger new ways of thinking that in turn make new inventions possible. Leonardo didn’t have trouble with concepts or imagining new realities. But the lack of necessary technology meant that his flying machine would be incapable of momentary flight, let alone the sustained kind.
The title
of the podcast “The Brilliant, Groundbreaking, and Wildly Overrated Leonardo da Vinci" concisely
summarizes the contrary negative view of Leonardo’s scientific achievement. To
be sure, Sam Kean makes a couple of valid
points: that Leonardo couldn’t concentrate enough to bring projects to
fruition, and that by working in isolation he was unable to benefit from
research by others that would either spark his creativity or correct his hypotheses.
However, Kean doesn’t take into account a few factors about
Leonardo’s intellect and environment that may have affected how he worked.
First, why couldn’t the artist concentrate, particularly when the inability to do so severely disappointed patrons? I wondered if this might have been because he was manifesting adult ADHD, and sure enough that was strongly suggested in a 2019 study by King's College London researcher Professor Marco Catani.
The lack
of collaboration requires even more context. At least as far as his painting
was concerned, Leonardo did collaborate, through a common artistic practice of
the Renaissance—employing young assistants who, by carrying out his
instructions, could learn the craft themselves.
But when
it came to science, he may have been afraid to let others know his
thoughts. It was less a matter of paranoia that someone else might steal his
ideas than a more justifiable fear that unconventional scientific conclusions could
contradict Roman Catholic teaching and lead to heresy charges.
Consider,
for instance, Copernicus (unwilling to publish his theory of a sun-centered
universe until he was on the brink of death in 1543) or Galileo (who, a century
after Leonardo, did attract the unfortunate attention of the Inquisition with
his own astronomical studies).
Finally, Leonardo's opportunities to work with other scientists were few to far between. The first scientific society didn't start until Rome's Accademia dei Lincei (Lincean Academy) in 1601, two centuries after his speculations on flight.
In any case, posterity had no opportunity to benefit from his notes (in which the left-handed artist used "mirror writing," most likely either to prevent smudged notes or to force concentration).
Leonardo's 28,000 surviving pages, in notebooks and codices, were scattered after his death in 1519. After his papers were collated and decoded, they would not be published until well into the 1800s, by which time most of the important early work in aerodynamics had been published.
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