Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is best known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, yet his notebooks hold thousands of pages of machines: devices for flying, diving, fighting and entertaining. Six of them stand out because they anticipate inventions that only became real centuries later: a diving suit, a flapping-wing flying machine, a parachute, a mechanical knight, a 33-barrelled gun and an armoured fighting vehicle.
The short answer to "did Leonardo invent these things?" is: he designed them, but almost none were built in his lifetime. They lived on paper, written in his famous left-handed mirror script. What makes them remarkable is how closely some of them match later technology, and how several have been reconstructed and tested in modern times, with surprising results.
Many of these drawings come from his first long stay in Milan, at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza. In a famous letter offering his services to the duke, Leonardo presented himself mainly as a military engineer, promising bridges, siege equipment and new weapons, and mentioning painting almost as an afterthought. Below is each design, what it was meant to do, and what we now know about whether it could have worked.
The diving suit: sabotage beneath Venice's lagoon
Around 1500, while staying in Venice, Leonardo sketched equipment that would let a man work underwater. The republic was worried about attacks from the Ottoman fleet, and his idea was that divers could approach enemy ships from below and damage their hulls before they reached the city.
The design used a leather suit of pigskin treated with fish oil, a helmet with two glass eyepieces, and a breathing tube of bamboo joined to a float made of cork and wood so the top stayed above the surface. When the BBC built a version for its 2003 documentary series on Leonardo, the diver was able to walk on the seabed as the notes described, although only down to a limited depth.
Leonardo deliberately kept some underwater methods to himself. He wrote that he would not publish them, according to translations of his notes, "by reason of the evil nature of men", fearing they would be used to sink ships and kill crews.
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The flying machine: wings modelled on birds and bats
Human flight fascinated Leonardo for most of his life. He filled notebooks with studies of how birds turn, glide and land, and he drew a series of flapping-wing machines now usually called ornithopters. In the best-known version the pilot lies face down and drives the wings with hands and feet through cranks, rods and pulleys, while the wing frame copies the structure of a bat's wing.
It could not have worked. Human muscles are far too weak, relative to body weight, to flap wings large enough to lift a person, and Renaissance materials were heavy. A popular story claims one of his assistants broke a leg testing a machine on Monte Ceceri near Florence, but biographers have found no evidence for it.
Still, the work was not wasted. His careful observation of airflow and bird flight was genuinely scientific, and the machine has had a long afterlife in popular culture; gamers will recognise a version of it from Assassin's Creed II.
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The parachute: a linen pyramid that actually worked
If flying was out of reach, coming down safely was another matter. In the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo sketched a pyramid-shaped frame covered with sealed linen. Under the drawing he noted that with such a canopy a man could jump "from any great height without suffering any injury", in the commonly quoted translation.
For five centuries nobody knew whether he was right. In July 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas built a version from materials available in Leonardo's day and jumped with it. The canopy descended smoothly, and the test is now widely described as proof that Leonardo had designed a working parachute. It is a neat reminder that a design can be sound long before anyone has the chance, or the nerve, to test it.
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The mechanical knight: a Renaissance robot
Around 1495, again in Milan under Sforza patronage, Leonardo worked out a humanoid automaton dressed in a suit of German-Italian armour. A system of pulleys, cables and gears hidden inside let the figure sit up, move its arms, turn its head on a flexible neck and open its hinged jaw. Drums inside it may even have produced sound as it moved, which would have made it a memorable piece of court theatre.
The sketches were scattered across different notebooks, and the design was only pieced together in the 1950s by the Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti. Later, the American roboticist Mark Rosheim worked with Pedretti on a computer model, and in 2002 he built a working version for a BBC documentary. Contrary to some popular accounts, the knight was not designed to walk: its movements were seated gestures of the arms, head and jaw.
The project influenced real engineering. NASA later commissioned Rosheim to design a humanoid robot, and he drew on Leonardo's studies of human movement in that work. In 2007 a second team at the Leonardo3 museum in Milan built its own operating reconstruction.
The 33-barrelled organ: an early rapid-fire weapon
Muskets and small cannon of the 1400s were slow to reload, so a soldier who had fired was vulnerable for a long time. Leonardo's answer, drawn in the Codex Atlanticus, was a wheeled gun carrying 33 small barrels arranged in three racks of eleven. While one rack fired, the second could be loaded and the third left to cool, and the whole drum turned to bring the next row into position. A worm screw set the firing angle.
It is often called a forerunner of the machine gun. That comparison is loose: each barrel still had to be loaded and fired by hand, and nothing in it fired automatically. But the principle of rotating banks of barrels to keep up continuous fire is the same idea later used in volley guns and, much later, in the Gatling gun. The museum in Leonardo's home town of Vinci displays a reconstruction.
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The armoured car: a tank on paper
A drawing now in the British Museum, dated to about 1485, shows a round, cone-roofed war vehicle bristling with guns. In one sketch the roof is removed to reveal the gearing inside, and Leonardo's note says eight men work it, the same men who steer it and chase the enemy. Another view shows it firing in every direction. The vehicle is often described as carrying more than thirty light guns around its rim, although the number varies between accounts.
Leonardo admitted its limits. His note says it is good for breaking through enemy ranks but needs infantry to follow behind. The British Museum's curators consider these machines impractical: the weight would have been enormous for human cranking, and the vehicle would have struggled on rough ground.
There is also a curious flaw. As drawn, the gears would turn the front and rear wheels in opposite directions, so the vehicle could not move forward. When a team made a working model for a BBC documentary, they had to change the gearing. Some historians suggest the error was deliberate, a way to stop anyone building the machine without Leonardo's help, but that remains a theory rather than a documented fact.
Leonardo Da Vinci Secrets
Why so few of Leonardo's inventions were built
Several reasons explain why these ideas stayed on paper. The materials and power sources of the time were not up to the task: there were no light metals, no engines and no precision machining. Leonardo also tended to move on to new problems before finishing old ones, and his notes were private working documents, not blueprints prepared for workshops.
After his death his pupil Francesco Melzi inherited the notebooks, and over the following centuries many pages were scattered, sold or lost. Today his studies of machines alone run to more than 5,000 surviving pages in collections such as the Codex Atlanticus in Milan, the Royal Collection at Windsor and libraries in Paris and London. Some designs became famous only when scholars rediscovered and studied these pages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
There is a tension in his military work too. Leonardo sold his skills as a weapons designer to rulers who needed them, yet his own notes show unease about how inventions could be misused. Reading the drawings today, what stands out is less any single machine than his method: watch nature closely, ask how it works, then sketch a mechanism that might copy it. That habit of mind is the real legacy behind the six designs above.
Sources: Wikipedia: Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci; Wikipedia: Leonardo's robot; Wikipedia: Adrian Nicholas; British Museum: Leonardo's studies of military machines (c. 1485); Museo Leonardiano, Vinci: the 33-barrelled organ model. Image selection originally compiled by All That Is Interesting; photo credits appear under each image.
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