When it comes to the geniuses of mankind, any artifact has great historical value, even if it has no great artistic or scientific value at first. This is what happened with a Leonardo Da Vinci scribble notebook, considered "irrelevant." However, new research indicates that they bring studies on friction! And this in 1493 - about 15 years before Da Vinci himself described this force of physics.

History says that it was the Italian painter and scholar himself who first talked about friction in 1508, but to this day it was unknown where or when he had been inspired. Professor Ian Hutchings of Cambridge University analyzed the scribbles in his 1493 notebook and found the first drafts of Da Vinci's study there.

The page with the inscriptions drew attention in the early 20th century because of the drawing of a woman with the inscription “ cosa bella mortal passes and non dura ”, meaning “mortal beauty passes and not lasts”. However, the pieces written in red chalk were described as "irrelevant" by the director of a museum in 1920.

Page called irrelevant contained advances in physics long before they were officially discovered

Da Vinci: A Visionary Man

Almost 100 years later, Hutchings found that the inscriptions are accompanied by geometric figures pulled by a weight that hovers over a pulley - exactly the same study that is currently used to explain the forces of friction. "The outline and texts show that Leonardo understood the foundations of friction in 1493, " says the researcher.

Hutchings states that Da Vinci understood that the frictional force acting between two surfaces is proportional to the pressing of the surfaces in contact and is independent of the apparent area of ​​contact between them. These laws of friction were more accurately described 2 centuries later by French physicist and inventor Guillaume Amontons.

He also concludes that this understanding of the laws of friction helped Da Vinci to design much more complex machines over the next 20 years - so much so that he worked on the concepts of wheels, axles and pulleys. This is just further proof that the Mona Lisa painter was a man far beyond his time.

Current studies are very similar to Da Vinci's sketches

* Posted on 7/28/2016