Hands-on exhibits the fruit of one of humankinds most inquisitive minds are on display at the National Museum of Science in Haifa.
by Daniella Ashkenazy
Against the backdrop of the grind of gears turning and the clank of metal pinions locking in place, underscored by periodic thuds and pings of metal-on-metal, children and adults take turns turning cranks and levers of strange-looking machines. These thirty-odd full-size facsimiles of the engineering inventions found in Leonardo Da Vincis notebooks are only a small sample of his ideas. The exhibit is fittingly housed in the original campus of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa today the home of the National Museum of Science.
The exhibit highlights the lifelong fascination that Da Vinci (1452-1519) had with mechanics, particularly gear wheels and screws. Among the working models on display are his improvement on the Archenemies screw a coil of tubing around a shaft and a calibrated metal file-maker that lifts and drops a hammer on a file blank at equal intervals, designed centuries before the Industrial Revolution. One of the more unique blueprints brought to life by the museums team is a mechanical military drum which plays different cadences through the use of revolving pegs a device considered by some as the first programmable machine.
The exhibit also includes a host of items that demonstrate Leonardo De Vincis remarkably wide vision. One example is his interest in water and hydraulics; his drawing of a design for canal locks meant to connect Florence to the sea similar to those employed to this day in Panama and the St. Lawrence Seaway is exhibited here. Also shown here is his design for a one-man elevator, with a mechanism based on pulleys and gears.
Professor Zvi Dori, who, together with Dr. Rivka Hashimshony, serves as curator for the exhibit, stresses that while other museums have constructed some of the devices found in Da Vincis notebooks for display purposes, the present exhibit is the first hands-on demonstration where visitors can actually touch and work the mechanisms rather than merely gaze at them from a distance. Moreover, a good number including the file-maker, the drum, a pile driver and a device that converts circular motion to linear motion have never been built before.
"Da Vinci viewed his notebooks as studies. He never built the devices or published the blueprints," explains Professor Dori. Da Vincis notebooks were passed along to a friend upon his death and only rediscovered in the 19th century. Ironically, some of Leonardo Da Vincis designs such as ball bearings were only re-invented hundreds of years later.
Professor Dori, a physicist, one of the founders of the museum and its first director, adds that some of Da Vincis designs were only improvements on existing technology, but his engineering outlook was unique. Others built machines one-by-one as independent entities. Da Vinci viewed machines as a composite of certain universal mechanisms screws, gears, drive shafts and so forth. It was only 250 years after his death that the elements he sketched and studied from wedges and pulleys to ratchet wheels and ball bearings were formally defined at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.
The exhibit focuses on elements in mechanics and hydraulics with which museum-goers may be familiar; but the machines chosen for reconstruction also illustrate Da Vincis modular view of some of the building blocks of mechanical design a revolutionary approach well ahead of its time.