Leonardo Da Vinci’s Parachute

Leonardo da Vinci, the most versatile genius of the Renaissance, is best remembered as the painter of the Mona Lisa (c. 1503) and The Last Supper (c. 1495). Da Vinci is almost equally as famous for astonishing multiplicity of talents such as: architecture, sculpture, music, engineering, geology, hydraulics and the military arts. With success in all, da Vinci also used spare time doodling sketches for working parachutes and flying machines like helicopters that eventually turned out to resemble inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Da Vinci made detailed drawings of human anatomy which are still highly regarded today. Da Vinci was also known for his engineering of canal locks, cathedrals, and engines of war. Leonardo was conveniently quirky enough to write notebook entries in mirror script, or backwards script, a trick which kept many of observations from being widely known until decades after eventually death.

Leonardo da Vinci discussed the parachute in a notebook entry now contained in the Codex Atlanticus. Although it is unlikely that da Vinci actually tested the idea, a drawing by da Vinci in the codex shows a pyramid-shaped parachute and is accompanied by the following text: Se un uomo ha un padiglione de pannolino intasato, che sia 12 braccia per faccia e alto 12, potrà gittarsi d’ogni grande altezza senza danno di sé. (If a man has a structure made out of coated cloth 12 arms wide and 12 tall, he will be able to throw himself from any great height without hurting himself).

Leonardo da Vinci’s parachute concept most likely came about from testing the feasibility of one of a flying machine. Although da Vinci himself probably did not get into any of the machines (most likely one of his apprentices – Leonardo would have been an old man at the time) he still would have realized that the designs were unstable and/or down right dangerous compared to other inventions that actually worked.

As shown in the pictures, it simple projects a man hanging onto the parachute with his bare hands - which is very simplistic for Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci clearly had confidence in the design and had done some actual mathematical calculations for it - possibly based on some of his wind resistance and friction studies. But the question the of whether or not it still worked was completely unanswered.

At the time, the parachute did not work, but later on it did. Over 500 years after it was designed, in the late June of 2000, Leonardo da Vinci’s parachute was tested by a team of enthusiasts and parachutists. The only modification made was to strengthen the harnesses holding the parachutist in place. This was a modern harness because it was overall much safer. The guinea pig (Adrian Nicholas) would also carry his own modern parachute, just in case da Vinci’s was faulty. Thankfully though, it was not needed, as Leonardo’s parachute worked just as the designer had imagined for it to. Adrian landed in the hills of South Africa without a single scratch.

In da Vinci’s original prototype of the parachute, the thought, or idea, for people to escape burning buildings by jumping off of them or out of them without sustaining any injury came about. The pyramid shaped parachute was really just a sketch that was never actually tested by anyone until later in the 18th Century by Sebastien Lenormand who demonstrated it in 1783. The pyramid shape was intended to be formed with linen cloth and mounted open by four large wooden rods. The original measurements were 23 feet wide and 12 feet high.

Originally, the parachute never actually worked, but Leonardo Da Vinci was proven right on Monday, June 26, 2000, some 500 years after the sketched design for the world's first known parachute was created. A British man, Adrian Nicholas, dropped from a hot air balloon 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) above the ground, after ignoring expert advice that the canvas and wood contraption would not fly. It weighed a hefty 85 kilograms (187 pounds). In the wide open spaces of Mpumalanga, South Africa, Mr. Nicholas safely floated down, saying the ride was smoother than with modern parachutes.

The purpose of this project was to recreate an idea from the renaissance era. Da Vinci thought of an issue and tried to come up with a solution. We made a model that looked like the original design but was just scaled down. We found fault with the parachute in the way that it was made. Along the seams of the wooden dowels, we discovered gaps within the structure. Air would basically just flow through the cloth without getting caught. This is probably why it was never tested in the beginning when da Vinci first sketched it out. Overall though, the project did not have much other faults other than that.

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