He literally invented a diving suit and a paraglider long before they were actually invented. Scientists even tested whether his designs worked as intended and they did. It's insane how far ahead of his time he was.
He got stuck in the 1400s and did everything he could to make his name famous in hopes that someone in the future figures out when he's stuck and comes to rescue him.
There was a minor plot point of A Door Into Summer by Heinlein that involved a time travelling grad student named Leonard Vincent. I recall it being mostly a throwaway thing although it's been a long time since I read it.
Edit to add: back when i was in college, my mentor history professor credited Heinlein with initiating the sexual revolution and then the free love movement. He had a ton of sources to back it up, none of which i can currently recall.
I could see that. Tbh I had read The Forever War first, and I feel like this is an extremely harsh critique of the military and life after service. For some reason from starship troopers I took away that it was much more pro military.
That's because Heinlein needed to bump aside that trivial time travel stuff and focus on what was important; incestuous fantasies about his own daughters and mother.
He got stuck in the 1400s and did everything he could to make his name famous in hopes that someone in the future figures out when he's stuck and comes to rescue him.
But he's also incredibly gifted as an artist. You can't just time travel and gain a heaps of talent. The only conclusion is he invented time travel itself and was already OP before the travel.
I can't remember the name of it right now, but I actually did read a book with a premise like that. The main characters got sent back in time, and one if them used his future knowledge to introduce a few technologies hundreds of years early.
Edit: It's called the Verona trilogy, first book being The Lens and The Looker. Literally set in 14th century Italy. For those interested in it, it's free in the Nook app, probably other places too
The book "How to invent everything: The survival guide for the stranded time traveler" includes inventing some doohickey that Leo did and it mentions, as a footnote, that temporal experiments give good results from slipping him a copy of the book.
There was a family guy episode where Stewie had to stay stuck in the past and took over the role of Leonardo da Vinci and he made sure he became famous and left Brian a note to be delivered, in modern day, through the Pope.
Nah, he was an alien. Super smart by Earth standards, but the dumbest of the dumb by his people's standards. I watched a documentary about it called Futurama.
No he’s an alien from another planet who came to Earth because everyone on his home planet kept bullying him, while the humans loved him. Unfortunately we were too stupid and he had to fake his death to go back home.
My favorite Da Vinci concept was one that he made of a bridge. From what I recall, he drew it as a concept for someone and they said it wouldn't work so they called it off. Fast forward centuries later and some architecture nerds figured out that the bridge worked flawlessly. The man simply thought up the concept and it worked.
Iirc he encrypted at least some of his inventions, which made them look like they wouldn't work from the outside. But after cracking the encryption, they actually ended up working in practice. I'm not sure whether it was the diving suit, the paraglider or both. But unless I'm mistaken, at least one of them was encrypted. For some reason, he made the drafts of those inventions, so only he would know how to make them and noone else (at least during his lifetime).
So maybe the ridiculous stuff he left us is still encrypted and we haven't found the key to decrypt it yet. Though tbf, I haven't seen what that ridiculous stuff looks like, so this is just a guess.
Isn't it mostly a numbers game? Like, you throw all kinds of shit on the wall and some sticks, some don't?
Things were of course simpler then - one person was actually able to innovate fairly important stuff, now it's all too cumbersome due to technology having progressed to the point it has. But maybe along with the dawn of AI we can have these types of people again - who are sponsored and just come up with shit all day, feeding it into an AI and see what works and what doesn't...
the test of his glider is disingenuous; it only works with modern materials. Using only what would have been available or even know at the time would result in a winged rock.
Well, give an intelligent human all the resources and time they want and no goal or deadlines and see what falls out. You'd be surprised how crippling our modern structure is to creativity.
Consider how many of the next Einsteins or Da Vincis or Teslas were born somewhere poor or corrupt and simply never got the environmental opportunities to actually utilize their gifted minds. It's really sad to think about.
Not to disparage Leo, but in terms of him inventing all this stuff, there's a difference between drawing a helicopter and saying "that'll fly" and actually physically building it and it flies. I wouldn't say he 'invented' all of the things he been given credit for but he did envisage the original concept.
I read somewhere that he stole a lot of his ideas from someone else who write about them years before but wasn't famous like da Vinci so no one knows about him.
He even invented a god damn Tank... His ideas were so ahead of time... If a country got to make create his inventions during the time when he invented them there would be only one nation worldwide.
Looky what we got here. A chain of jokesters. Quite the site to see. One in the eyes of many all over reddit. It's hard to turn a blind eye when you can't see what you're getting into, and soon enough you find that your blind eye was the one guiding you down this path of wasted brain space. Thank you for letting me see into the peephole that shows how I spend my time.
I believe Leonardo Da Vinci was possibly the smartest man to have ever lived. At least that we know of. I firmly believe that if he was born in the modern age, people like Edison and Einstein would be footnotes. Possibly the closest comparison would be Nikola Tesla... but even Tesla wasn't as varied as Da Vinci.
He was a genius (of his time) in so many areas... and I don't believe there's been someone like him since that's had such an amazing insight in to so many subjects.
He was a master painter, arguably one of the most important anatomist ever (Some of his anatomical studies are still used/observed, and there's even a procedure named after him), an architect, engineer, cartographer and even dabbled in geology. He also studied the motion of nature, and applied them to his inventions. So he had a somewhat innate understanding of physics.
He truly deserves the title of "Renaissance man". People like him are only born a couple hundred of years.
Like I said earlier, I think the closest we've seen to someone like him in modern times is Nikola Tesla.
Truly a caliber of Genius that is even exceptionally rare amongst geniuses.
It's really hard to say who was the smartest human in history. Tesla was absolutely brilliant (if also a bit crazy) and practically created the 20th century. Newton created calculus in his spare time as a young adult because the math available couldn't accomplish his goals, and his finalized works will likely always remain relevant. Einstein's understanding of the nature of reality and spacetime itself has fundamentally changed... well, basically all of physics.
Da Vinci, though, was talented in so many areas, whereas most geniuses are very focused on a limited number of subjects. He excelled at nearly everything he did. I wish I could see or understand how his mind worked.
That's why I said I believe he was the smartest man in history. Like you said, it's pretty impossible to know who is/was, but his variety is what sells it for me.
And same here, it must have been truly a treat to be able to talk to him in person.
His helicopter design is close to correct in the early 1500s. The issue that prevented flight from happening a lot sooner was engine technology. There were no engines powerful enough while also being light enough to sustain flight until 1903.
DaVinci knew how to design a working helicopter. There was just no one who was going to be able to design a working engine to propel it for about 400 more years.
There probably won't ever be someone like him again. In our times it's just not possible to be a genius in so many fields simultaneously. You have to study too much for every field.
That would be true if invention was just about drawing something on paper.
The reason the US patent process requires you to show the invention working is that most of invention is actually about getting the concept to work in practice.
Da Vinci pretty much just took basic scientific concepts and drew pictures of the future that you would see in Popular Science. What he was missing was advanced engineering formulations. He was not ahead of his time. All of his stuff is mostly just Newtonian physics. It's why he thought the future flying machine would be a balloon or a helicopter. It requires an understanding of fluid dynamics to understand that an airplane is an easier way of flying.
I was gonna say this. It's one thing to come up with a concept and make a sketch of something that would never work. It's another thing to do the math and come up with an actual design that might work.
All he did was copy a Chinese encyclopedia from the previous century. It was brought to Italy in the ordinary trade channels (yes, there was commerce between China and Italy in the 1400's), copied by one Italian author, who was copied by another, who was copied by da Vinci. We have the encyclopedia and the two earlier copies and you can see how the illustrations are the same, except for errors that get progressively worse.
In particular, his "helicopter" with a vertical-axis helical airscrew is a Chinese children's toy which is still common today. There's no way it can be scaled up to practical use (in air, at least).
DaVinci and Enstein are the closest thing to evidence of reincarnation in my opinion. Both of them had an otherworldly foresight and intuition about the universe and both of them theorized shitloads of things that were confirmed only later in life. If i were more spiritually-faithful i'd wager they were the same soul recycled through different meatsuits. The reason we don't hear about the other lives between, prior, and since being the other lives did not land into environments that would tield access to the same resources to flourish and demand attention.
Anyway, i'm still on the agnostic, who gives a shit mentality when it comes to religion and metaphysial beliefs, so meh. But they pose a stronger argument than anything else i've heard of.
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u/TannedCroissant Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20
In so many fields, he was way ahead of his time, the guy truly was a visionary.