To imag­ine our­selves into the time of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, we must first imag­ine a world with­out such things as heli­copters, para­chutes, tanks, div­ing suits, robots. Yet those all exist­ed for Leonar­do him­self — or rather, they exist­ed in his imag­i­na­tion. What he did­n’t build in real life, he doc­u­ment­ed in his note­books, leav­ing behind mate­r­i­al for appre­ci­a­tions of his genius that would con­tin­ue half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er. One such appre­ci­a­tion appears above in a new video from Lost in Time, which ren­ders his inven­tions using the kind of 3D ani­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy even the par­a­dig­mat­ic Renais­sance man couldn’t have begun to fore­see.

This helps us see Leonar­do’s work from the per­spec­tive of his con­tem­po­raries, and to feel how sur­prised they would’ve been to encounter a seat­ed knight who stands up, opens his visor, and reveals that there’s no one inside the armor. That sort of thing might even amuse us here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, but accus­tomed as we are to see­ing machines that move around under their own pow­er — and now, see­ing them take more cred­i­ble humanoid form every day — we would­n’t be inclined to cred­it it with any kind of life force.

In the four­teen-nineties, how­ev­er, man­pow­er was what peo­ple knew, so they instinc­tive­ly looked for the man. Leonar­do, too, con­ceived most of his inven­tions to employ human mus­cle, the study of whose inner work­ings enabled him to make the gears and pul­leys of his “robot­ic” knight move its limbs real­is­ti­cal­ly.

Accord­ing to the plans in one of Leonar­do’s note­books, his “aer­i­al screw,” involv­ing a linen sail wrapped around a wood­en mast, would need four men run­ning in cir­cles around a revolv­ing plat­form, which would the­o­ret­i­cal­ly cause the mast to rotate and the whole con­trap­tion to lift into the air. As designed, it would­n’t have been able to take off, but in 2019, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land sci­en­tists mod­i­fied it to work suc­cess­ful­ly in minia­ture, as a kind of drone. As shown in the video, that’s not the only one of Leonar­do’s unre­al­ized inven­tions his intel­lec­tu­al descen­dants have tried out for them­selves. It seems that none have yet attempt­ed to con­struct his near­ly 80-foot-wide cross­bow, whose use on the bat­tle­field required the efforts of a dozen sol­diers, but then, that’s prob­a­bly all to the good.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inven­tions Come to Life as Muse­um-Qual­i­ty, Work­able Mod­els: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Char­i­ot, Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine & More

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

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

Explore the Largest Online Archive Explor­ing the Genius of Leonard da Vin­ci

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Ancient Rome nev­er had an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. Grant­ed, cer­tain his­to­ri­ans have object­ed now and again to that once-set­tled claim, ges­tur­ing toward large heaps of pot­tery dis­cov­ered in garbage dumps and oth­er such arti­facts clear­ly pro­duced in large num­bers. Still, the fact remains that Ancient Rome nev­er had an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion of the kind that fired up toward the end of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, but not due to a com­plete absence of the rel­e­vant tech­nol­o­gy. As explained in the new Lost in Time video above, Romans had wit­nessed the pow­er of steam har­nessed back in the first cen­tu­ry — but they dis­missed it as a nov­el­ty, evi­dent­ly unable to see its pow­er to trans­form civ­i­liza­tion.

That’s just one of a vari­ety of exam­ples of gen­uine high Roman tech­nol­o­gy fea­tured in the video, many or all of which would seem implau­si­ble to the aver­age view­er if insert­ed into a sto­ry set in ancient Rome.

Take the set of auto­mat­ic doors installed in a tem­ple, trig­gered by a fire that heats an under­ground water tank, which in turn fills up a pot attached to a cable that — through a sys­tem of pul­leys — throws them open. (When the fire cools down, the doors then shut again.) This was the work of the Greek-born inven­tor Hero of Alexan­dria, who would bear com­par­i­son in one sense or anoth­er with every­one from Rube Gold­berg to Leonar­do da Vin­ci.

It was also Hero who came up with that ear­ly steam tur­bine, called the aeolip­ile. He came along too late, how­ev­er, to take cred­it for the “self-heal­ing” Roman con­crete pre­vi­ous­ly much-fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, the mate­r­i­al of build­ings like the Pan­theon, “still the largest unre­in­forced con­crete dome in the world.” Anoth­er inven­tion high­light­ed in the video comes from Alexan­dria, but well before Hero’s time, and even before that of the Roman Empire itself: the accu­rate water clock engi­neered by Cte­si­bius, whose under­ly­ing design remained influ­en­tial in the Roman era. Hydraulic pow­er was also used in Roman mills, which made pos­si­ble com­plex fac­to­ry sys­tems, even in a civ­i­liza­tion that nev­er reached an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion prop­er. And if a Roman fac­to­ry work­er got thirsty at break time, maybe he could drop a coin into one of Hero’s wine vend­ing machines.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Life­lines of Their Vast Empire

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Roman Baths

The Roman Colos­se­um Decon­struct­ed: 3D Ani­ma­tion Reveals the Hid­den Tech­nol­o­gy That Pow­ered Rome’s Great Are­na

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

The Ancient Roman Dodec­a­he­dron: The Mys­te­ri­ous Object That Has Baf­fled Archae­ol­o­gists for Cen­turies

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Design­ing their new repub­lic, the Found­ing Fathers of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca looked back to ref­er­ence points in clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty. That instinct con­tin­ued to shape Amer­i­can endeav­ors long there­after, and not just polit­i­cal ones. Take the exam­ple of Mount Rush­more, one of the coun­try’s most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tions. Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived in the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties as a moun­tain sculp­ture of Amer­i­ca’s wild-west heroes, a means of rais­ing the sta­tus of the fledg­ling state of South Dako­ta, it was soon changed into a stone trib­ute to four pres­i­dents: Found­ing Fathers George Wash­ing­ton and Thomas Jef­fer­son as well as Abra­ham Lin­coln and Theodore Roo­sevelt.

Mount Rush­more’s sculp­tor Gut­zon Bor­glum sug­gest­ed the switch from region­al fig­ures to nation­al ones, and it would­n’t be the last good idea he would bring to the table. As explained in the Pri­mal Space video above, he also fig­ured out how to repli­cate his ini­tial sculp­ture of the four pres­i­dents, made at one-twelfth-scale, on a 500-foot-tall cliff edge.

Build­ing all the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture on and around the moun­tain con­sti­tut­ed a major project in and of itself. But when the work­ers got into their har­ness­es, how would they know where to direct their jack­ham­mers into the rock? To guide them, Bor­glum adapt­ed a mechan­i­cal tech­nique used by ancient Greeks to copy stat­ues, a “point­ing machine” that could “mea­sure spe­cif­ic points on a sculp­ture rel­a­tive to a ref­er­ence point,” mak­ing a three-dimen­sion­al shape trans­fer­able from one sculp­ture to anoth­er.

Bor­glum designed a large-scale point­ing machine that could be installed atop the moun­tain and posi­tioned to show work­ers where and how deep to drill. Though the sys­tem worked well, the team could only make progress so fast: after four­teen years, Mount Rush­more remained incom­plete when Bor­glum’s death and World War II put a stop to it alto­geth­er. Yet enough had been fin­ished to give it the icon­ic appear­ance that has made it rec­og­niz­able the world over, if not always by name. When I recent­ly gave a talk about Amer­i­can his­to­ry to some young stu­dents in South Korea, where I live, one of them iden­ti­fied a pho­to of Mount Rush­more as Mount Olym­pus — and, in a civ­i­liza­tion­al sense, maybe she was on to some­thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Restores the Orig­i­nal Col­ors to Ancient Stat­ues

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

How Mon­u­ment Val­ley Became the Most Icon­ic Land­scape of the Amer­i­can West

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.