Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci, known as one of the most prolific, if not best inventors of our time, studied math, science, art, math, music, astronomy, and multiple other practices, incorporating them all into his ideas and discoveries. He is most famously known as an artist with works such as the Mona Lisa and the Vitruvian man which can be seen reproduced on almost any object in souvenir shops. However, he was not simply an artist by nature but took to studying the human body, perspective, and geometry to absolute perfection. Da Vinci invented so much of the machinery we use now. Though seemingly simple relative to our inventions nowadays, his engineering was genius and way ahead of his time. He invented things such as levers, gears, cranks, pulley systems, etc. So much of what we use in daily life and engineering comes from Da Vinci's simple systems. He was the epitome of the "Renaissance man" and the ability to excel in multiple disciplines and be a man of the world. His thirst for knowledge and prolific output of new ideas is now considered superhuman and incomprehensible to most. The Da Vinci museum in Vinci took a number of his sketches and turned them into real, tangible inventions, one of which was the flying machine. His understanding of flight and aerodynamics was so ahead of his time because no one actually flew a plane until the Wright Brothers in 1903, centuries after Da Vinci. One of the most amazing inventions, though seemingly obscure was the viola organista, designed in 1488, which was a musical instrument designed much like a violin that used a friction belt to vibrate strings but was operated by pressing a key, much like a piano. The genius of this is that the early form of the piano, the clavichord, was not invented until the early 1500's and the piano as we know it was not invented until 1700, centuries later. The real piano is made up of levers and hammers, much like Da Vinci's inventions of them. The machine project incorporated this concept of piano's and drawing which was fitting for Olivia and I. The machine was essentially designed much like a piano, to be triggered by a hammer, which would drop and hit another lever, which caused it to pop up and hit another section of the machine. The piano works in this way where pressing the key triggers a hammer to hit a lever which then strikes the string, causing the string to vibrate and produce sound. In its simplest form, the piano is just a series of hammers and levers that work according to how hard you press on the initial key.