Da Vinci Machines Exhibition

I went to two exhibitions recently, the Da Vinci Machines exhibition, and the Picasso Love and War exhibition. I think I'll blog about them in chronological order, 'cause it seems so nice and logical :)

The Da Vinci Machines exhibition http://www.visitvictoria.com/displayObject.cfm/objectid.4F0E53E6-1ECC-4830-9C7C89AD0882093D/vvt.vhtml features (or featured, the exhibition is finished in Melbourne now :( ) models made from his designs, constructed using only materials that would have been available in his era. It was fascinating! The man really was a genius, and not just for his paintings. The engineer in me was especially impressed with the ball bearings. In the models they were constructed from wooden balls, instead of the more familiar metal, but it was easy to see the principal of reducing friction between two moving surfaces. These days we take for granted the technologies that make use of ball bearings, but they are just so fundamentally useful!

There were a lot of amazing uses of gearing systems, including da Vinci's design for a car with its approach to converting rotational enery in one direction into rotational energy in another direction, allowing a drive shaft down the centre of the car to power axles at the front. More advanced versions of this principle are used in cars today.

There were a number of models that you were allowed to interact with, usually by turning a handle, to see the mechanism working. They were a lot of fun, and made it much easier to understand how the machine worked.

The list of workable inventions Da Vinci came up with is long and impressive, including a parachute, pitons for climbing walls, a bicycle, gliders, and a number of machines for lifting heavy materials. He also came up with a number of improvements to existing mechanisms.

There were also the ideas which wouldn't have worked as Da Vinci envisioned them, but are still amazing ideas, such as his idea for a helicopter.

I had some issues with the exhibition layout, the pages of information about each model were on A4 paper, positioned close to each model, and contained a lot of information. The problem with this was that the exhibition was crowded (probably because it was nearing its finish) and it took a while for each person to read each information sheet and move forward. Larger information sheets, which could be read from a greater distance by more people at a time would have helped a lot with the crowding. That said, the models themselves were wonderful.

All in all, a most excellent exhibition.