- ROME -- So this is where
we went wrong. Here is the fork in the road. More than 500 years before
politicians and environmentalists wrestled with the threats and appetites
of the SUV, Leonardo da Vinci showed us the way to go: an automobile made
of wood, controlled by the world's first computer, and consuming the cheapest
fuel in the world, elbow grease.
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- After several fruitless attempts, experts in Leonardo
studies and robotics have finally worked out how the Leonardo automobile
was intended to function. This week a full-size model of the car was on
show in the Museo Leonardiano, in the Tuscan village of Vinci where the
genius was born.
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- But it is unlikely to catch on. For a start, there is
nowhere to sit; it seems the vehicle was conceived for Renaissance court
theatrical performances, to amaze and delight the local lords and ladies
with the sight of a vehicle trundling along, turning corners and coming
gently to a halt with no human involvement of any sort. In conception,
the vehicle is closer to the sort of wheeled robots that whiz around Japanese
factories, fetching and carrying, than to a passenger-bearing car.
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- It has three wheels, two at the front and one at the
back, so with the operator perched on it setting the navigation system
it looks like an over-size Stone Age ice-cream cart.
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- The motive power is familiar to any child: you coil the
springs that drive it forward by pushing the vehicle backwards. You then
secure it with a rope, waiting for the cue to let fly.
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- The discovery of how Leonardo intended the vehicle (found
on page 812R of his Atlanticus Codex) to work was slow and tortuous. For
many years researchers thought the motive power came from two big leaf-springs
on the top of the vehicle. But when they constructed scale models based
on that interpretation, they refused to budge.
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- The breakthrough came when Carlo Pedretti, director of
the Armand Hammer Centre for Leonardo Studies in Los Angeles, poring over
copies from the Uffizzi archives of sketches by Da Vinci showing the vehicle
from above, twigged that the problematic springs were not intended to drive
the car but to control its navigation.
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- The motive power, Professor Pedretti decided, came from
springs contained in two drum-like casings on the vehicle's underside.
This intuition was endorsed by Mark Rosheim, an American robotics expert.
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- Digital models were constructed on a computer to test
the vehicle's viability; when they appeared to work, Professor Paolo Galluzzi,
director of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence,
who was in overall control of the project, approached Florentine wood craftsmen
to get a model built for real, using materials that were available in the
15th century. That meant five different types of wood, the hardest being
reserved for the car's cogs.
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- "This carriage," Mark Rosheim said, "can
be considered a precursor of mobile automatons, and perhaps, indeed, the
first computer ever built in Western civilisation". Readers who have
got this far will have gathered that the car was not intended for Da Vinci
family jaunts in the Tuscan countryside. Its range, in fact, was only about
36 yards before it required rewinding. After the navigation had been programmed
and the restraining rope released, the vehicle was its own master.
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- Paolo Galluzzi believes that "most probably"
an early prototype of the vehicle was built, but the finished work remained
locked in the pages of Da Vinci's notebooks, its springs tightly wound
since 1478, waiting to be unleashed on the world.
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- But that was true of most of his extraordinary conceptions,
including helicopter, tank, submarine, multi-barrel machine-gun. At one
scale or another. most have now been realised, and been put on show in
the museum in the village of Vinci, which celebrates its expansion this
week with the unveiling of the Leonardo car.
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- Romano Nanni, the museum's director, said: "As Leonardo
became older, he dedicated more time to mechanical sketches and doodles
than to art." Other visions that flowed from his pen included a parachute,
a suspension bridge, a mechanical calculator, and a solar heater, using
mirrors to warm water.
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- One idea, perhaps uniquely, seems to have inspired technological
development in his own lifetime: a machine called the "gold-beater"
in which a hammer controlled by gears pounds a bar of gold held in a protective
sheath to produce gold leaf for picture frames. Unlike many of Leonardo's
other visions, the car, it has now been proved, would actually have gone
places, stunning and delighting anyone lucky enough to clap eyes on it.
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- But anyone unlucky enough to be in its pre-programmed
path would have been flattened. That is why Leonardo One has yet to make
its maiden voyage: they do not dare risk it.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=537621
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