If you walk through the Clos Lucé in France, you’ll see them everywhere. Giant wooden gears. Canvas wings. Life-sized models of things that look like they belong in a steampunk movie rather than the 15th century. It’s easy to get swept up in the myth. We love the idea of a lone genius sitting in a candlelit room, inventing the modern world 500 years before the rest of us caught up. But when people ask what did da vinci invent, the answer is actually way more complicated than "the helicopter."
He was a tinkerer. A dreamer. Honestly, he was a bit of a procrastinator too.
Leonardo da Vinci didn't really "invent" things in the way we think of Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla. Most of his "inventions" never made it past the doodles in his notebooks—the famous codices. He wasn't building prototypes in a factory; he was exploring the physics of what could be. He was obsessed with how birds flew and how water moved.
The Flying Machine Fallacy
Let’s talk about the ornithopter. You’ve seen the drawing. It looks like a giant bat wing made of wood and silk. Leonardo spent years obsessed with human-powered flight. He watched birds. He dissected their wings. He calculated the lift needed to get a man off the ground.
But did he invent the airplane? Not really.
The physics were all wrong for his time. Humans don't have the chest muscles to flap wings, and Leonardo eventually realized this, shifting his designs toward gliding. His "aerial screw"—often cited as the first helicopter—is another great example. It’s a beautiful design. It’s essentially a giant linen screw intended to "drill" into the air. However, if he had actually built it, the thing would have just spun the pilot around in circles like a top. It lacked a tail rotor to stabilize it.
Still, the concept of the screw propeller is right there in his 1480s sketches. That's the genius of it. He wasn't giving us a blueprint; he was predicting a mechanic.
War Machines and the Borgia Connection
Leonardo hated war. He called it "pazzia bestialissima"—most beastly madness.
And yet, he spent a huge chunk of his career pitching weapons to rich, violent men like Cesare Borgia and Ludovico Sforza. When you’re an artist in the 1400s, you go where the money is. And in Renaissance Italy, the money was in killing people more efficiently.
So, what did da vinci invent for the battlefield?
- He designed a "fighting vehicle" that looks remarkably like a turtle shell. It was covered in metal plates and bristling with cannons. It needed eight men inside to crank the wheels. Fun fact: in his drawings, the gears were set up to move the wheels in opposite directions. It wouldn't have moved. Some historians think he did that on purpose so no one could actually steal and use the design.
- He came up with the "33-barreled organ," which was basically an early version of a machine gun. Instead of one barrel firing fast, it had rows of barrels that could be fired in succession.
- Scythed chariots. These were terrifying. They had rotating blades designed to quite literally mow down infantry.
It’s a weird contrast. The man who painted the Mona Lisa was also dreaming up ways to dismember soldiers. But again, almost none of these were built. They were psychological warfare on paper, meant to impress patrons and keep the commissions flowing.
👉 See also: The Best Ways to Use Emojis on Mac Without Losing Your Mind
The Stuff That Actually Worked
While the tanks and helicopters get the museum exhibits, Leonardo’s real inventions were often much smaller and more practical. These are the things that actually saw the light of day.
He was a master of hydraulics. He designed a system of canal locks that are still the basic blueprint for how we move boats through different water levels today. If you’ve ever seen a miter lock—those V-shaped gates that use water pressure to stay shut—you’re looking at Leonardo’s DNA.
He also invented an automated spit for roasting meat. It used a fan placed in the chimney; as the hot air rose, it turned the fan, which turned the meat. The hotter the fire, the faster the meat spun. It was a self-regulating system. It’s brilliant because it solves a mundane problem using basic thermodynamics.
The Robotic Knight
This sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. Around 1495, Leonardo designed what we now call "Leonardo’s Robot." It was an armored knight filled with a series of pulleys and cables.
Because of his deep understanding of anatomy—honed by performing illegal dissections on cadavers—he knew exactly how joints needed to move. His drawings showed the knight could sit up, wave its arms, and move its jaw. In 2002, a robotics expert named Mark Rosheim used Leonardo’s notes to build a working model. It worked perfectly.
NASA has actually used Rosheim’s work on Leonardo’s designs to help develop robots for planetary exploration. Think about that. A guy from the 15th century is helping us design tech for Mars.
Why Didn't He Build Them?
It's the nagging question. If he was so smart, why didn't he change the world while he was alive?
Basically, the materials didn't exist. You can't build a tank out of wood and expect it to survive a 15th-century battlefield. You can't build a flying machine without an internal combustion engine or high-strength carbon fiber. Leonardo was a man trapped in the wrong century. He had the "software" for the modern world, but the "hardware" was still stuck in the Middle Ages.
🔗 Read more: britbox.com connect fire tv: What Most People Get Wrong
Also, he was a total polymath. His brain moved too fast. He would start a project, get obsessed with the way light reflected off a dragonfly's wing, and leave the invention half-finished to go write twenty pages on optics. We have thousands of pages of his notes, but they are a mess of "mirror writing" (he wrote backwards) and scattered thoughts.
Common Misconceptions: What He Didn't Invent
We tend to give him credit for everything.
- The Bicycle: There’s a famous sketch of a bike found in his papers, but most experts now agree it’s a forgery added much later by a monk "restoring" the manuscripts.
- The Scissors: People say he invented them to cut canvas. He didn't. Scissors have been around since ancient Egypt and Rome. He probably just had a really nice pair.
- The Compass: Mariners had been using these for centuries before he was born.
The Legacy of the "Inventor"
When we look at what did da vinci invent, we shouldn't look for physical objects. We should look at the scientific method. He was one of the first people to say, "Don't just believe what the old books say. Observe. Test. Repeat."
He pioneered the idea of the "exploded view" drawing. You know those IKEA manuals that show you how all the parts of a chair fit together? Leonardo basically invented that style of technical illustration. He treated the human body like a machine and machines like living organisms.
He bridge the gap between "what is" and "what could be."
How to Apply the Da Vinci Mindset Today
You don't need to be a Renaissance genius to use his methods. His real "invention" was a way of seeing.
👉 See also: US military spaceplane concerns: Why the X-37B makes everyone so nervous
- Keep a "Commonplace Book": Leonardo carried a notebook everywhere. He wrote down questions like "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does the tongue of a woodpecker look like?" Constant curiosity is a skill you can practice.
- Cross-Pollinate Your Skills: He wasn't just an artist or just an engineer. He used his knowledge of muscles to build robots and his knowledge of light to paint better. If you work in tech, read about psychology. If you’re a writer, study logic.
- Visual Thinking: Don’t just write your ideas; draw them. Even if you’re a terrible artist, mapping out a problem visually changes how your brain processes it.
- Embrace the Pivot: Leonardo famously didn't finish many things. While that’s frustrating for his patrons, it allowed him to follow the most interesting paths. Sometimes, the "failed" project is where the real discovery happens.
The next time you see a drone or a submarine, remember that someone in a pink tunic was dreaming about them in a dusty workshop in Florence 500 years ago. He didn't build our world, but he certainly saw it coming.
To truly understand Leonardo's impact, the best next step is to look at his original sketches through the digitised collections of the British Library or the Codex Arundel. Seeing the raw, backwards handwriting alongside the drawings of gears and tendons makes his process feel much more human and less like the work of a distant god. Take a specific problem you're facing today—a workflow bottleneck or a design flaw—and try to sketch it out as a physical machine with levers and pulleys. It forces a level of mechanical clarity that modern digital tools often hide.