Bruce Sterling on Design
THE CODE
DA VINCI
LIVED BY
Renaissance hacks by the
father of all geeks.
Leonardo dissected bats and birds to design the wings
for his human-powered flying machines.
hydrodynamics. Leonardo sketched tens of thousands of fantasy machines, from ball bearings to
gigantic cranes, yet somehow, they always stay on
one message: “Leonardo is amazing.” His notebooks
are an endless series of air-guitar solos in a world
that hasn’t yet invented orchestras.
Leonardo’s a one-man show. When Leonardo
envisions a super-cannon, it’s a multi-barreled blunderbuss that one guy can use to destroy an army.
When he imagines an airplane, it’s one guy soaring
on batwings. His submarine is one guy secretly
drowning an entire ship full of enemies. When his
giant war chariot chops a company of soldiers like
wheat in a combine harvester, you just know that
the victims will be forced to wonder, “Who the heck
did this to us? He must be some kind a genius!”
A dredge is a machine for digging with a big
scoop. Most of us would consider a dredge to be
a very practical, roughneck, and muddy kind of
machine. A Leonardo dredge is not just a big shovel
with pulleys. It’s a splendid altar to canal digging,
a showy, towering enterprise whose nifty gearings
must attract public attention for miles around.
Canals are supposed to be handy waterways where
people can ship stuff in boats. Leonardo’s canals,
extensively planned but never built, are Leonardo’s
personal adornments to the map of Italy, a kind of
environmental art installation.
When Leonardo explores human anatomy, healing other people is the last thing on his mind. It’s
Make:
Model from a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci was donated to The Exhibition Alliance
by the IBM Corporation. The exhibition is circulated by The Exhibition Alliance Inc., Hamilton, NY.
“I HAVE PLANS FOR BRIDGES, VERY LIGHT
and strong … I have plans for destroying every fortress … and ships, which can resist the fire of all the
heaviest cannon … I can make armored cars….”
That’s Leonardo da Vinci, asking the Duke of
Milan for a job, ten years before Columbus discovered America.
Leonardo got that job. He went to Milan to make
huge bronze statues, giant cathedrals, enormous
canals, secret tunnels, and a bristling host of giant,
terrifying, remarkably sadistic war machines.
Leonardo had plenty of plans — volumes full of
them, plans stuffed in the margins of his plans. But
Leonardo never shipped the products. He never
made any of those things.
In practice, Leonardo mostly made ingenious
special effects for festival entertainments. His
glamorous stage shows for dukes and kings were
the main reason these worthies kept him around.
Leonardo also painted masterpieces, but reluctantly and not very many. Nowadays his paintings are
what’s left to us to see. The royal festival entertainments vanished like soap bubbles, as soon as his
amazed contemporaries stopped saying, “Wow!”
As for his glorious cities, super-machines, and
giant canals ... some were possible, barely. But
making them required an aggressive, full-scale
engineering outfit like General Dynamics or
Halliburton, not a visionary wizard in a velvet hat.
The Renaissance couldn’t work that way, because
no mere king or duke could give Leonardo a budget
that size, or that many resources in men and materials. His ideas were glorious — too glorious to have
a business model.
“Wow” is the unifying theme that runs through
the great man’s scatterbrained interests in anatomy,
human flight, submarines, mathematics, physics, and
43
all about his need to figure out how human flesh
works; it’s got nothing to do with him trying to
cure people or give them any kind of benefit. Even
his dead cadavers seem surprised and impressed
by him: “Wow! Look! Leonardo cut me open and
learned my anatomical secrets!” In his autopsy
Leonardo sketched tens
of thousands of fantasy
machines, from ball-bearings to gigantic cranes,
yet somehow, they always
stay on one message:
“Leonardo is amazing.”
work, Leonardo radiates hackerly glee at having
pulled off a scary, little-known, semi-legal, very
difficult stunt.
Leonardo is always particularly eager to do amazing
things that any normal guy would consider impossible. So quite a few of his coolest inventions really
are impossible. It’s not that Leonardo is ever a fraud
— for instance, he manages to figure out, from his
own researches, that perpetual motion is a swindle.
That’s a genuine tribute to his common sense. But
the science of physics hasn’t been invented yet, so
Leonardo has no way to calculate how much energy
his imaginary machines require to run.
Leonardo sketches out ingenious systems of
worm gears, cranks, and ratchets — spinning
wheels, counterweights, giant timber beams
— but where’s the engine? In Leonardo’s world
the “engine” is usually a solo guy. He’s the ideal
Leonardo engine worker, and when Leonardo
sketches him out, he’s commonly this tiny little guy
in the corner — half-naked, firmly muscled, and
really getting into his labors.
He looks pretty much like Charlie Chaplin
trapped by machinery in Modern Times, but full of
Renaissance. When it comes to a really tough job,
like flying, Leonardo will put four guys on the job.
Leonardo’s helicopter has four guys running around
pushing capstans and driving a big paper screw up
into the air. In reality, those four guys would have to
be four 200-horsepower aircraft engines.
What Leonardo needed, to make his dreams leave
paper and take flight, was the Industrial Revolution.
He never got one, because that was centuries away.
44
Make: Volume 02
What Leonardo’s fate was to become was what he
had most wanted to be, all along — Leonardo from
Vinci, an Officially Amazing Guy. He finally died,
much respected and pampered, in the entourage of
the King of France. The King never asked Leonardo
to do anything much or carry out any practical
assignment. It was more than enough for the King
just to listen to Leonardo ranting about the amazing
stuff he’d figured out.
Leonardo was blazingly eager to do incredible
things, using secret techniques he had learned himself, demonstrated in as public and showy a way as
possible. For Leonardo, that’s what technology was
all about. So he was an engineer. And mostly an artist.
But above all, an ego-driven, visionary entrepreneur.
Bill Gates owns his codices. Leonardo da Vinci was
the father of the modern geek.
In his Codex Atlanticus,
Leonardo stated about his
parachute: “Anyone can
jump from no matter what
height without any risk
whatsoever.”
Bruce Sterling ([email protected]) is a science fiction writer
and part-time design professor.