Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Design for a Perpetual Motion Machine

Is per­pet­u­al motion pos­si­ble? In the­o­ry… I have no idea…. In prac­tice, so far at least, the answer has been a per­pet­u­al no. As Nicholas Bar­ri­al writes at Mak­ery, “in order to suc­ceed,” a per­pet­u­al motion machine “should be free of fric­tion, run in a vac­u­um cham­ber and be total­ly silent” since “sound equates to ener­gy loss.” Try­ing to sat­is­fy these con­di­tions in a noisy, entrop­ic phys­i­cal world may seem like a fool’s errand, akin to turn­ing base met­als to gold. Yet the hun­dreds of sci­en­tists and engi­neers who have tried have been any­thing but fools.

The long list of con­tenders includes famed 12th-cen­tu­ry Indi­an math­e­mati­cian Bhāskara II, also-famed 17th-cen­tu­ry Irish sci­en­tist Robert Boyle, and a cer­tain Ital­ian artist and inven­tor who needs no intro­duc­tion. It will come as no sur­prise to learn that Leonar­do da Vin­ci turned his hand to solv­ing the puz­zle of per­pet­u­al motion. But it seems, in doing so, he “may have been a dirty, rot­ten hyp­ocrite,” Ross Pomery jokes at Real Clear Sci­ence. Sur­vey­ing the many failed attempts to make a machine that ran for­ev­er, he pub­licly exclaimed, “Oh, ye seek­ers after per­pet­u­al motion, how many vain chimeras have you pur­sued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”

In pri­vate, how­ev­er, as Michio Kaku writes in Physics of the Impos­si­ble, Leonar­do “made inge­nious sketch­es in his note­books of self-pro­pelling per­pet­u­al motion machines, includ­ing a cen­trifu­gal pump and a chim­ney jack used to turn a roast­ing skew­er over a fire.”  He also drew up plans for a wheel that would the­o­ret­i­cal­ly run for­ev­er. (Leonar­do claimed he tried only to prove it couldn’t be done.) Inspired by a device invent­ed by a con­tem­po­rary Ital­ian poly­math named Mar­i­ano di Jacopo, known as Tac­co­la (“the jack­daw”), the artist-engi­neer refined this pre­vi­ous attempt in his own ele­gant design.

Leonar­do drew sev­er­al vari­ants of the wheel in his note­books. Despite the fact that the wheel didn’t work—and that he appar­ent­ly nev­er thought it would—the design has become, Bar­ri­al notes, “THE most pop­u­lar per­pet­u­al motion machine on DIY and 3D print­ing sites.” (One mak­er charm­ing­ly com­ments, in frus­tra­tion, “Per­pet­u­al motion doesn’t seem to work, what am I doing wrong?”) The gif at the top, from the British Library, ani­mates one of Leonardo’s many ver­sions of unbal­anced wheels. This detailed study can be found in folio 44v of the Codex Arun­del, one of sev­er­al col­lec­tions of Leonardo’s note­books that have been dig­i­tized and made pub­licly avail­able online.

In his book The Inno­va­tors Behind Leonar­do, Plinio Inno­cen­zi describes these devices, con­sist­ing of “12 half-moon-shaped adja­cent chan­nels which allow the free move­ment of 12 small balls as a func­tion of the wheel’s rota­tion…. At one point dur­ing the rota­tion, an imbal­ance will be cre­at­ed where­by more balls will find them­selves on one side than the oth­er,” cre­at­ing a force that con­tin­ues to pro­pel the wheel for­ward indef­i­nite­ly. “Leonar­do rep­ri­mand­ed that despite the fact that every­thing might seem to work, ‘you will find the impos­si­bil­i­ty of motion above believed.’”

Leonar­do also sketched and described a per­pet­u­al motion device using flu­id mechan­ics, invent­ing the “self-fill­ing flask” over two-hun­dred years before Robert Boyle tried to make per­pet­u­al motion with this method. This design also didn’t work. In real­i­ty, there are too many phys­i­cal forces work­ing against the dream of per­pet­u­al motion. Few of the attempts, how­ev­er, have appeared in as ele­gant a form as Leonardo’s. See the ful­ly scanned Codex Arun­del at the British Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness