Helen Gardner, in her book
Art through the Ages (1970) writes of
Leonardo da Vinci’s “unquenchable curiosity,” and we see
this reflected in the 13,000 pages of his famous journals, in which he made a
daily record – in notes, drawings, and scientific diagrams – of his observations and studies. These notebooks cover a wide range of interests and
phenomena, from human anatomy and facial expressions to animals, birds, plants,
rocks, water, chemistry, optics, painting, astronomy, architecture and
engineering.
Biographer Daniel Arassa
recounts just how far da Vinci would go to try to understand everything around him. On one occasion, the great man
coated the wings of the fly with honey to find out if this would change the
sound of its buzzing noise in flight. Observing
that the note produced by the fly was lower than usual, he attributed this to
the fact that the ballasted wings were beating the air less rapidly than
before. Thus, da Vinci concluded that the pitch of a musical note is connected
with the speed of the percussive movement of the air.
Da Vinci’s acute observations led him to think
about and try to solve problems that hadn’t been seriously considered before. Nobody,
for example, was asking for a parachute, a car, a submarine, a hang glider, a
diving suit, a helicopter, a calculator, or floating shoes and stocks for
walking on water, but Leonardo da Vinci invented, or at least conceptualized,
these things.
He also came up with
military innovations like the machine gun, the armoured tank, the finned mortar
shell, a giant crossbow, a triple-barrel cannon, and a mobile bridge. He sketched
mechanical breakthroughs such as a steam engine, a hydraulic pump, a reversible
crank mechanism, a flywheel system, ball bearings, a hoisting machine, a more
accurate clock, an automated bobbin winder, a lens-grinding machine, and a
machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He designed the world’s first
canal lock system, a method for excavating tunnels through mountains, a
720-foot (220 m) single-span bridge, a new kind of musical instrument, a double
hull for ships, an industrial use for solar power, and a fully functional robot
(which he built and displayed for his patron, Ludovico Sforza, at a celebration
in Milan in 1495).
“Da Vinci,” writes Rowan Gibson, “was able to spot unmet needs and innovation opportunities because he
was vastly more observant and more engaged with his environment than
others. He was focusing his attention on
issues and frustrations that most people simply ignored.”
[Quoted from The 4 Lenses of Innovation (2015) by
Rowan Gibson. Title mine]
Lord, Give
Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)
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