Back in Florence, where he certainly continued to work as a painter, complaints were heard that he was neglecting what he supposedly did best in favour of ‘mathematical studies’. As Leonardo famously observed, for him mechanics was the fruit of the mathematical sciences, and he was always concerned to apply his knowledge to understand the world and to found his inventions on sound theory. Since hills west of Florence create rapids in the river Arno and so prevent the city receiving shipping directly, Leonardo conceived of a great canal that would sweep north-west on through the pass of Serravalle, perhaps even by a tunnel and then rejoin the Arno much further to the west. For this project Leonardo proposed to take water from the upper Tiber by canal to a much enlarged Lake Trasimeno, and thence to the Arno above Florence. If this scheme did produce some beautiful cartography, it would have been far beyond the capacities of his day. However another canal he planned, to connect Milan with lakes Lecco and Como, was attempted later in the sixteenth century, although on a much more modest scale.

How far did he apply his ideas on the theory of machine motion to the invention of real machines? Many of his draughts, even the most finished and exquisite illustrate machinery which already existed in some form or other, and are depicted in earlier manuscripts, such as hoists, pumps and watermills, even if his versions are often particularly ingenious. Still, he did invent several quite new devices, exploiting the techniques pioneered in spring watches, and extending his innovative powers to metal cutting machines; boring bars for cannon, presses for nails, lathes for cutting files or screws. For textiles he designed original instruments to speed up and control the process and increase production.

Were his ideas on engineering lost with him, in the dispersion of his notebooks? Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists, written about thirty years after Leonardo’s death, asserts that “one can find drawings of his ideas and experiments scattered among our craftsmen today; I have seen many of them”. Fifty years on another admirer of Leonardo attributes to him sawmills, lock gates amid much else and claimed that “in craft workshops many machines invented by Leonardo are in use”, including a meat grinder for sausages “by means of a wheel turned by a boy, without risk of flies or stink”. So Leonardo whose engineering had sometimes been regarded as a distraction in his life time, became, at least on home ground, the inventor hero.

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Content last updated: 20/04/2003

About our expert

Dr Alex Keller was born in Hendon in 1932. He studied History at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. After some years in Israel, returned to Cambridge to do a Ph.D on Early Printed Books of Mechanical Inventions 1569-1629 and published an anthology of pictures from these books, as A Theatre of Machines (1964).
Since then he has taught the History of Science at Leicester University, where he is now a University Fellow. Apart from various articles on these inventors, and on the mathematical arts of the Renaissance, Twenty One Books of Engineering and Machines, his translation with commentary of a sixteenth century Spanish technical encyclopaedia came out in 1998.

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