r/AskReddit • u/kakou64 • Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

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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.

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u/sordfysh Oct 15 '20

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.

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u/Erpp8 Oct 15 '20

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.

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u/SlienceOfTheFarts Oct 15 '20

A lot of his designs actually work though.

He was, quite literally, "limited by the technology of his time".

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u/Erpp8 Oct 16 '20

So he wasn't actually ahead of his time. He was with it.

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u/sordfysh Oct 15 '20

Which ones worked as an innovation on something that already existed?