Free Leonardo Da Vinci by Kathleen Krull Page A

arrangement of the manuscripts. Scholars sorted the notebook pages into ten books of what were called codices, now hungrily collected by museums. One codex, all about water, the only one in private hands, belongs to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and fan of Leonardo.
    Much was lost, probably forever, due to carelessness, fires, floods, and wars. It is estimated that about half of the notes have surfaced (so far).
    After Leonardo, discoveries about the natural world picked up speed. Big names were about to be emblazoned: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. Many historians mark 1543—twenty-four years after Leonardo’s death—as the start of the Scientific Revolution. The study of anatomy gradually became more respectable. Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish doctor, published On the Structure of the Human Body in 1543. For writing the first accurate book on anatomy, he is considered the father of modern medicine and biology.
    That same year, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his earth-shaking book, On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies. The sun, not the earth, is the center around which planets revolve, declared Copernicus. Modern astronomy was on its way.
    A hundred years before English doctor William Harvey published his discovery of the circulation of the blood in 1628, Leonardo had been investigating the body as a system of tubes, ducts, and valves, understanding that the heart moves blood.
    Two hundred years before English scientist Isaac Newton published his famous Three Laws of Motion in 1687—his explanation for the scheme of the universe—Leonardo was exploring the reasons why objects fall and move the way they do. In his studies on flight, he observed how air resistance works. Newton said, “Objects at rest tend to remain at rest.” Leonardo wrote, “Nothing moves, unless it is moved upon.”
    As for why the sky is blue, Leonardo understood that particles in the air somehow interact with light waves. In 1871, the English Lord Rayleigh worked out the exact reasons and got all the credit for the discovery.
    Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, in the mid-1800s, came to some of the same conclusions as Leonardo. Both of them theorized that Earth’s characteristics—such as mountains and valleys—are the result of processes that took place over enormously long periods of time.
    Four hundred fifty years before the Wright brothers flew in 1903, Leonardo was designing flying machines in every form he could conceive of, with the certainty that one day human beings would take to the air.
    And so on, and so on, in and out of the centuries. It is an amusing game, with the advantage of hindsight, to find Leonardo everywhere.
    It is possible to exaggerate his discoveries, or to regard him as an isolated miracle man. But he wasn’t that isolated. Leonardo was able to draw from thinkers he admired. Sometimes all he did was point out the errors of his contemporaries. Sometimes he was wrong. And sometimes he leaped ahead in still mysterious ways as only geniuses are able to do. He was free to think what he pleased, with no university or school of thought stamped on his brain. But just the fact that he was delving into all these sciences is, for a man living in that long-ago world, stunning.
    The big question is whether later scientists saw Leonardo’s work and thus were able, as Newton said, to “see further.” Because so much remained hidden away for so long, scientists after Leonardo carried on without his insights, unable to plant themselves atop his mighty shoulders and “see further.”
    Still, it is possible that Galileo, for example, was familiar with some of Leonardo’s manuscripts. Also, we know that a later Dutch physicist had a brother who bought some Leonardo pages in London. In 1690, this physicist, named Christiaan Huygens, published his theory of the wavelike nature of light. Had he read about Leonardo’s earlier work on the same theory? No way to tell.
    In any case, other scientists after Leonardo, who