Leonardo's aerial screw

Uncommon card · No. 195779

The Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci drew his design for an "aerial screw" in the late 1480s, while he was employed as a military engineer by Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan from 1494 to 1499. The original drawing is part of a manuscript dated to 1487 to 1490 and appears on folio 83-verso of Paris Manuscript B, part of the papers removed from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1795 by Napoleon and still held by the Institut de France in Paris. Leonardo biographer Walter Isaacson has expressed the belief that it was "devised for a theatrical spectacle". The "aerial screw" was one of several aerial machines drawn by Leonardo, including an early parachute, an ornithopter and a hang glider. The pen-and-ink sketch outlines an idea for a flying machine similar to a modern helicopter, with a spiral rotor or "aerial screw" based on a water screw, but intended to push against the fluid of the air instead of water. The design comprises a large structure, built on a hard circular platform, with a central...

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