A man before his time

Friday
It was a dull day today, with the likelihood of rain in the afternoon, so we thought it would be a good day to drive up to Dayton to the United States Air Force Museum. It’s always a great place to visit, three huge hangars full of planes, and it’s free (!), but they are currently featuring a special exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci, Machines in Motion. Remembered by many for his masterpieces the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci is also celebrated as a sculptor, architect, engineer and anatomist. His thousands of manuscripts, collectively named the “Codicies,” contain designs that are the precursors of many modern machines and devices, including the car jack, glider, parachute and armored vehicle. Leonardo da Vinci: Machines in Motion presents 40 full-scale machines, many of them operational, that were built following in-depth study of Leonardo da Vinci’s designs by a group of scientists and skilled craftsmen in Florence, Italy. The machines are grouped into four sections based upon applications linked to the elements–air, water, land and fire–which held a strong fascination for Leonardo da Vinci. Most of the materials used in the construction of these machines were available in Leonardo da Vinci’s era, and are the ones proposed by him in his codices, including wood, rope and glue, and were crafted by hand (using tools prescribed by the master himself). Top right was his pillar lifter, bottom left the chain drive, leading to the present day bicycle among other things, Moving materials in the lower center and Locking the load, a simple design preventing a rotating gear wheel from spinning in the opposite direction.
When we’d finished with the exhibition, we had a couple of hours to visit some of the rest of the museum, but we barely scratched the surface!
We had gone without lunch, so we stopped on the way back for an early dinner, then a little later went to the cinema to see the film Belfast, which was very good.
Step count: 7,035
Have a good weekend fellow blippers, and thanks for stopping by my journal!