Chapter summary:
In my youth, Leonardo da Vinci seemed the greatest genius of all time: an extraordinary inventor of every sort of machine, a magnificent sculptor, one of the world’s greatest painters and the finest illustrator and draughtsman who ever lived. Then, as my knowledge of Chinese inventions slowly expanded, more and more of Leonardo’s inventions appear to have been invented previously by the Chinese. I began to question whether there might be a connection – did Leonardo learn from the Chinese?
Leonardo drew all the essential components of machines with extraordinary clarity – showing how toothed wheels, gear wheels and pinions were used in mills, lifting machines and machine tools. All these devices had been used in China for a very long time. In the Tso Chuan are illustrations of bronze ratchets and gear wheels from as early as 200 BC which have been discovered in China.
Leonardo is renowned for his drawings of different forms of manned flight, notably his helicopter and parachutes and his attempts at wings. The earliest Chinese description of the possibility of manned flight occurred in the accounts of the short-lived and obscure Northern Ch’I dynasty (ninth century BC). The Chinese had made use of the essential principle of the helicopter rotor from the fourth century AD and by then, helicopter toys were popular in China, a common name being “bamboo dragonfly”. Parachutes were in use in China fifteen hundred years before Leonardo, hot air balloons were known in the second century AD in China and by Leonardo’s day, the kite had been in use for hundreds of years.
Leonardo drew an array of gunpowder weapons, including three variations of the machine gun, which can be seen in the fire lances used in China since 950 AD. Leonardo also drew different types of cannon, mortar and bombard. The Chinese use of bombard is well catalogued throughout the ages.
Comparisons of the machines of Leonard with earlier machines from China reveal close similarities in toothed wheels and gear wheels, ratchets, pins and axles, cams and cam-shaped rocking levers, flywheels, crankshaft systems, balls and chains, spoke wheels, well pulleys, chain devices, suspension bridges, segmented arch bridges, contour maps, parachutes, hot air balloons, “helicopters,” multi-barrelled machine guns, demountable cannons, armoured cars, catapults, barrage cannon and bombards, paddle wheel boats, swing bridges, printing presses, odometers, compasses and dividers, canals and locks.
Even the most devoted supporter of Leonardo (like my family and I!) must surely wonder whether his work’s amazing similarity to Chinese engineering could be the product of coincidence. Whether Leonardo appreciated it or not, he was surrounded by evidence of the Chinese impact on the Renaissance. However, that is a far cry from claiming that Leonardo copied existing Chinese inventions. One thing we can be sure of, Leonardo did not meet anyone from Zheng He’s fleets when they visited Florence in 1434. So it appeared the similarities noted above were due to an extraordinary series of coincidences.
Further reading:
Manuscripts – for more information click on individual links
http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/genindice.asp?appl=LIR&indice=65&xsl=listamanoscritti&lingua=ENG&chiave=800259
Vitruvius: On Architecture
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/home.html
Bert S. Hall, review of Leonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect by Paolo Galluzzi
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3105289
Mariano Taccola and His Books on Engines and Machines by Lon R. Shelby
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3103042
A Manuscript of Taccola, Quoting Brunelleschi, on Problems of Inventors and Builders
by Frank D. Prager: http://www.jstor.org/pss/986159
The Wilkins Lecture. The Missing Link in Horological History: A Chinese Contribution
by J. Needham: http://www.jstor.org/pss/100856
