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Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

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Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

Türkçe oku
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) defterlerini icatlarla doldurdu: uçan makineler, bir paraşüt, zırhlı bir savaş aracı, dev bir taş köprü. Bunların pek azı o yaşarken yapıldı; birçoğu da dönemin malzemeleriyle zaten çalışamazdı.

Leonardo neredeyse her gün not tuttu; binlerce sayfası günümüze ulaştı. Bu sayfalarda anatomi, ırmaklar ve kuşların uçuşu, alışveriş listeleriyle yan yana durur. 1505 dolaylarında yazdığı ve bugün Torino'da bulunan kısa Kuşların Uçuşu Üzerine Kodeks'te kuşların havayı nasıl kullandığını inceledi, onları taklit edecek makineler çizdi. Bazı fikirleri sonradan denendi. 2000'de İngiliz paraşütçü Adrian Nicholas, Leonardo'nun piramit biçimli tasarımına göre yapılan bir paraşütle güvenle yere indi. Leonardo 1502'de Osmanlı padişahı II. Bayezid'e, Haliç'in üzerinden tek bir kemerle geçen 240 metrelik bir taş köprü önermişti. Köprü hiç yapılmadı; ama 2001'de bu tasarımın küçültülmüş ahşap bir örneği Norveç'in Ås kentinde yaya köprüsü olarak açıldı. 2019'da MIT'den mühendisler de tasarımın ölçekli bir modelini yaparak köprünün ayakta kalabileceğini gösterdi.

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