An Artist's Depiction: The Aerial Screw and Da Vinci's thrist for flight.

What does it mean to be innovative? To create something new that no one has seen. This makes me think of the old cartoons, when a bubble popped over characters heads with a light bulb going on. Well it is clear that Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 - 1519) is one of the most innovative people ever to exist? Da Vinci takes credit for some of the most beautiful and theologically pleasing paintings and he spent tremendous amounts of time on understanding the anatomy of the human body and should be credited with the term Renaissance Man with the amount of diverse endeavors he took part in. It is quite possible that he is known throughout the world as the greatest painter(Rivaled alone with Michelangelo). However, what really stands out in Da Vinci's works are his detailed and technologically advanced drawings that he compiled in notebooks. In this episode of An Artist's Depiction, we will look at Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing of the Aerial Screw, which looks very similar to the modern day helicopter. The fact that Da Vinci was creating drawings of devices that would not come about for hundreds of years sheds some light at how advanced and ingenuous of a mind he had.




The inventions that Da Vinci was able to create and design are amazing and include such things as a parachute, a circular armored car (Tank), an automatic battering ram and improvements on weaponry. Da Vinci had a passion for flight and made many designs that dealt with flying, including a bird man suit. The one drawing that stands out is the Aerial Screw, which is a primitive version of the helicopter. Designed very similar to modern day helicopters, the Aerial Screw had a long shaft with a flat screw design on the top, which when turned by four passengers would lift up the contraption. Even though this device was never tested, it is believed that it wouldn't have worked, because four people would not be able to generate enough energy to stay in flight. However, just the fact that Da Vinci had these ideas in his head centuries before anyone would be able to get off the ground, shows just how advanced a mind Da Vinci really had.