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Comment by shermantanktop | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating the lengths to which people will attempt to fill in the gaps or correct “errors” to make a semi-working modern model appear physically similar to a paper sketch of a fanciful idea. I think I sort of get it: at some point the challenge becomes a thing unto itself.

But Leonardo was a genius precisely because his insights predated the experimental and iterative science spirit that came later, and which were necessary to produce practical technology. Can’t we just accept that his helicopter designs suck, his submarines were impractical, and his car was nonfunctional? They are still amazing and fascinating. Why contort or correct the designs to make them work?

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Functional things emerge from iterating over non-functional things. You have to start somewhere.

The first trial I made at a windmill blew apart in the first storm and you might not even have recognized it. Back to school, 6 months of learning, lots of math and engineering later: a scale model 1:2 to check if I got any better at it, that one worked but produced too little power for its size but we figured out why. Scale that up to 1:1 and it worked like a charm and powered our house for a couple of years. Without the failures there would be no success.

>Functional things emerge from iterating over non-functional things. You have to start somewhere.

Isn't this precisely what GP said?

Yes, but here you get a little anecdote. Similar to Calvin’s dad’s wooden escalator story.

Sure, but the point is that unfortunately a lot of the writing about Da Vinci doesn't locate his sketches correctly on this continuum. Often it is assumed that they all already worked, due to his (perfectly deserved) reputation as a polymathic genius.

A cynic and contrarian on the Internet, arguing that what is universally praised is overrated? What a unique phenomenon.

Sorry, a weird dude designing helicopters and tanks some 500 years before their invention, among his incredible research in other scientific fields, is nothing short of remarkable for anybody, unless you are a professional internet cynic, which is as mundane as air itself.

He literally said

>They are still amazing and fascinating.

Doesn't look like cynic or contrarian.

Thanks. I personally think that Leonardo was beyond “remarkable”. I just don’t think every doodle was a fully-formed complete idea, and insisting that they must be so is doing his genius a disservice. In those doodles you can literally see his thought process at work.

I don't think making someone a legend is the best way to celebrate an actual human being.

Leonardo da Vinci was human, he had flaws, he wasn't always right, and I think these are important things to point out in order to make the real achievements stand out.

Leonardo's flying machines were crap, which is to be expected when basic understanding of aerodynamics came hundreds of years after. Helicopters in particular are deceptively complex. And it would be a shame to put them on the same level as mechanisms he designed that actually worked.

I think it sets unreasonable expectations if you don't recognize the flaws of great men. And especially in science, being wrong happen, and it is not even a flaw.

Thank you for setting the record straight. God forbid someone wants to have Leonardo Da Vinci as their personal idol.

I don't really understand nor respect such an opinion. It is putting yourself on a moral pedestal by pointing out the flaws of someone more accomplished than you. Superiority by proxy, and it adds nothing to the conversation.

No one has said to make a statue of him and celebrate it as deity. I'm saying it is not a FLAW to imagine and design something 500 years before we can build it in the first place. Of course it is faulty.

What have you designed that will be talked about in half a millenium?

Fair point.

However the idea is not to put myself on a pedestal. I am not special. Not only I have my own flaws, of course, but if you think I try to put myself on the same level as Leonardo da Vinci, which is true in some way, as we are both people, I also put you on the same level as Leonardo da Vinci.

I don't know you, but like me, you are probably not a genius people will hear about half a millenium later. But you probably have some qualities neither I nor Leonardo da Vinci have. And on these points, you would make a better role model.

> Leonardo da Vinci was human, he had flaws, he wasn't always right, and I think these are important things to point out in order to make the real achievements stand out.

I don’t think any, or many, people believe da Vinci had no flaws. He was, however, indisputably brilliant in many ways, and is the literal embodiment of the Renaissance Man / Polymath.

It takes a specific type of person to be confronted with a persons’ achievements and say “well, you know, they still had their flaws, and not all of their ideas worked.” Da Vinci was a known self-critic, nobody was harder on him than he was on himself: he lamented on his deathbed that he had offended god for not being better at his art.

I’m unsure what you are contributing to the discussion.

Leonardo was surrounded by practical technology developed by an experimental and innovative science spirit. How else do you think people were able to make towers, cathedrals, dyes, looms, cannons, dikes, bridges, ships, aqueducts, windmills, cranes...?

> Why contort or correct the designs to make them work?

Because the end goal is something functional. If Leonardo was actually building it, he would have done the same.

If Leonardo was alive today, he’d be sketching a Dyson sphere with multiple layers and a habitat in between, or something equally far ahead of where we are today. He was a lot of things, but in the technology sphere I’d describe him as a visionary first, a builder second.

“…at some point the challenge becomes a thing unto itself.”

Erector/Meccano set is a solution waiting for a problem.

And you don’t get to the front of the internet making a daft version of Leonardo Da Vinci.

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