Pictures' Worth: The Machines

The day after Thanksgiving, my family and I visited the Palm Springs Air Museum to view their "da Vinci Exhibit." As the name suggested, it was a showcase of replicas of many of ol' Leo's inventions, as well as some copies of his artwork. Naturally, I took my camera along; here are some of the results.

Here we see the main room of the exhibit:

One of the first gadgets I found was the "air screw," da Vinci's idea of a helicopter.

Ever wanted to walk on water? Ever thought of investing in some pontoon shoes?

A set of pulley systems, devised by da Vinci to demonstrate a very useful principle: the more pulleys in a system, the easier it is to lift a given load. Read the accompanying sign (click the photo for a larger version) for more info.

A tank. A crew of men would ride inside to operate both the wheels and the cannon.

A warship called the "Scorpion." The large scythe mounted in the center was designed to make a mess of sails, oars, and anyone who got in its way.

Another war machine, the "war wagon" was meant to be pushed by a horse. The blades would spin as the wheels turned. As if being trampled by a horse weren't bad enough.

The "chamber of mirrors" was an eight-walled room with full-length mirrors on each wall. Not only could a person inside the chamber get a good look at himself, but a small hole in one of the walls provided an outside observer with a full, 360-degree view of anything inside the chamber. I was going to take a picture of the "box," but it was fairly nondescript on the outside. Then I got a better idea:

One of the more complex inventions in the exhibit, this hydraulic saw uses a water wheel to both move the saw vertically and move a log horizontally into the blade.

Da Vinci was a pioneer in the field of anatomy. He made quite a reputation for himself by performing autopsies on corpses to study the workings of the human body. This page from one of his notebooks deals with the other side of human development: an embryo.