For many centuries what we now call civil engineering was part of architecture; all public works on the grand scale were designed and supervised by those responsible for churches, castles and palaces. Some of the machines the architect had to know how to construct and use included the cranes and hoists needed for lifting and handling heavy weights. Over the years they had developed quite a repertoire of such machines. By the fifteenth century this led to conscious innovation. For his great dome over Florence cathedral, the architect Brunelleschi invented devices that enabled him to move weights high up into this huge space. Manuscripts of mechanical inventions also survive from these years. The best known, those of Mariano Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio -Tuscans like Leonardo da Vinci - were in their final versions intended for presentation and follow an organised pattern. They did not restrict themselves to solid weights : raising water was, if anything more important.

Force pumps, waterwheels and Archimedean screw pumps had been known since Antiquity and these fifteenth century manuscripts showed a renewed interest in them. But water was also a major source of power. Watermills were now common right cross Europe, and indeed water drove many other machines, crushing, grinding, sawing, hammering - wherever the waterwheel’s revolutions could be transferred to a rotating working surface or a reciprocating to and fro motion. Yet although so many different applications could be found, the draughtsmen of the fifteenth century seldom ventured far from these basic technologies.

When did Leonardo himself first become interested in engineering? Presumably before 1482, for when applying for employment to Ludovico Sforza, effective ruler of the duchy of Milan, he stresses more what he could accomplish in the realm of engineering, military and civil, than what he would do as a painter, although he had been active as an artist for some years. In Lombardy he would have seen hydraulic works, the irrigation of pasture, drainage of marshland and even navigable canals, which hardly existed in his native Tuscany. The main tributaries of the river Po had long been tapped as a source of power and water for the lush meadows of the plain. The men who undertook these works did their job along established lines. They measured the flow of water crudely, in order to allot the right quantities to each property but did not seek to establish precise rules of hydrodynamics so as to understand why water moves in the way it does, at different velocities; or what effects it might have on river banks or river bed.

Leonardo was evidently fascinated by every feature of the flow of water, how it rippled or bubbled, how eddies formed, why it seemed to curl over or around obstacles; where it eroded and where it deposited, what it bore. That curiosity is reflected in numerous beautiful sketches which had a practical purpose: he seems to have made some improvements to at least one of the local canals that brought building materials right into Milan.

Alongside his engagement with the mechanics of water, he tried to develop basic concepts of mechanics demonstrated through geometry and experiment so as to explain how all kinds of machines worked. In the manuscript known as Codex Madrid 1, the nearest he came to drawing up at least an outline of his intended study of machines, he surveyed most of all the fundamental elements - levers, screws, gears, pawl and ratchet brakes, cams, cranks, springs, of every conceivable type and in every combination. He seems to have thought on paper, almost like thinking aloud - but silently…so many ideas appear in his notebooks, sometimes just sketches, often a careful and detailed drawing, which might reappear elsewhere, modified as alternatives came to mind. Thus he developed a real visual language of mechanical representation.

    next > Page 1 of 2