FIRST 'PLANE DESIGN

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 55, Issue 109, 18 February 1935, Page 8

FIRST 'PLANE DESIGN

LEONARDO’S TRIUMPH. OVER FOUR CENTURIES AGO. While the inyention whose triumphant annihilation of terrestrial space is the achievement of this century, the dream of human flight ig old. It is a dream that passed from the realm .of fable tO' that of applied science more than four hundred years ago, when Leonardo da Vinci, having grasped the .true nature of the scientific problems involved, designed the first projected heavier-than-air machine.

His drawings, beautiful and ingenious, show thb first fumbling articulation after the idea of the aeroplane.

“My great bird,” he wrote, “will take off from the slope of Monte Ceceri, filling the universe with wonder, filling literature with its fame, bringing 'eternal glory to the. nest whence it was born.”

In his notes,' too, one finds with surprise that the greatest of the Florentines outlined his device for breaking the fall of a heavy body. Leonardo invented and made the first parachutes:

“If a man have a canopy,” he wrote in that magical script that ran from right to left,, “with the orifices filled up, twelve braccias broad and of the same height, he may throw himself from any height without personal danger.” When thinking of ours as the age of invention it is humbling to discover how many ingenious devices, regarded as of our age, wer£ bom in the marvellous mind of this great man. VThe Submarine. It is startling, for example, to find that Leonardo, in his role of inventor, considered the possibility of the submarine, for “a boat to pass under the sea like a fish and from its depth strike at the floating enemy.” He invented, too, the diving he’d, and the house’ telephone, the so-called Dionysian ear contrived for his master 1 , II Moroiv Turning from the easel to the making- of armaments and munitions, he designed a steam-operated cannon to fire conical projectiles and outlined hxs idea for a cannon to fire balls in quicit succession.

He invented bombs,hollow and to be filled with fumes and planned a method for gassing a ship at sea. His notes also show plainly that he invented a turbine.

Artist, . engineer, botanist, anatomist, astronomer, mathematician and mystic, his questing mind ranged over every sphere of human thought and human endeavour.

In an age under the domination of Galen’s teaching, he went to the human body for its secrets and dissected with the precision of a modern anatomist.

He rather more than suspected the blood’s circulation, and came at the secret of old age by the close observation of the arterial- systems of a centenarian and an infant.

Turning from the human body, he studied the flowers arid the trees. By more than four centuries he anticipated Bose in his discovery of the liferhythm of the plants, while he perfected the technique for grafting arid budding. ' Nothing, it would seem, was too little or too great for the curious attention of Leonardo.