Engineering Drawings: Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci

Engineering Drawings: Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci

Introduction

Leonardo da Vinci has been one of the greatest inventors of olden times (McCurdy, 2005); however he had a very diminutive influence on the technology of his age. da Vinci made diagrams and sketches of his inventions, which he saved in his personal notebooks (McCurdy, 2005), however either he was never capable of convincing one of his well-off patrons to invest in the construction of his designs or he lost interest in making them (Moon, 2007). Consequently, almost not any of da Vinci's inventions were published or built throughout his lifetime.

Discussion

Following are some of the many amazing engineering sketches made by this great artist:

Anemometer

(Madsen & Madsen, 2011)

Historians specify that it was Leonardo da Vinci's interest with air travel or flight that motivated him to conceive the anemometer (Moon, 2007), a device for gauging the wind speed. His anticipation was that, sooner or later, the instrument could be used to provide people the insight into the wind's direction prior to attempting flight (Moon, 2007).

Despite the fact that Leonardo did not actually invent the instrument, he did came up with distinction on the actual design invented by Leon Batista so that it was simpler to measure the force of wind. Leonardo's anemometer has an arched border with a rectangular wooden piece hanging in the middle by means of a hinge (Moon, 2007). As the wind blows, it lifts the wooden piece within the arched border. A scale would be printed on the border. By marking the maximum point that the wood attained on the scale, an individual could gauge the force of the wind (Moon, 2007).

33-Barreled Organ

(Madsen & Madsen, 2011)

The approach Leonardo da Vinci used to see it; the issue with the canons of that period was that they used to take a lot of time to load. Thus, Leonardo's solution to that issue was to construct multi-barreled guns that could be fired and loaded at the same time (McCurdy, 2005).

This thought forms the base of war innovations like Leonardo's 33-barreled organ, which was comprised of thirty-three small caliber guns linked together. The canons were alienated into 3 rows, each comprising of 11 guns (Galluzzi, 1997), all linked to a single rotating platform. There were large wheels connected to the sides of the platform. Each and every gun would be loaded and then, through battle, the 1st row of eleven would be fired (Galluzzi, 1997). Then the platform would be rotated to appropriately aim the subsequent row of canons. The thought was that though a single canon set was being fired, the other set would be soothing and the 3rd set could be loaded. This method let soldiers to fire repetitively without any interruption.

Leonardo da Vinci's drawing for the 33-barrelled organ is commonly considered as the foundation for the contemporary machine gun (Galluzzi, 1997) that is a weapon that did not actually develop for business use till the nineteenth century.

Armored Car

(Madsen & Madsen, 2011)

The pioneer of the ...