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Da Vinci's Ornithopter Prepares For a Test Flight
Dirak writes "Over 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci conceptualized a self-powered flying machine that would achieve both lift and thrust with flapping wings alone and named it the "ornithopter". Hot on the heels of the 100th Anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight, and the recent X prize, a team of scientists from University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace have taken on this challenge to make Leonardo's dream a reality."
Back in September, they tried to make it work but it didn't get very far at all...
The proper name to use is "Leonardo", or "Leonardo Da Vinci", not "Da Vinci". That's like referring to someone as "of Dallas".
Probably, but you never know... plus carftsmen of the past had shared secrets which got mostly lost over time (blame wars, plague, etc.) as how to build very light and yet solid structures out of wood (and eventually, stone). Think about european cathedrals. Most of them were made without any blueprint. That's truely wonderful. Re-building a working replica sometimes is the only way to go to get back that knowledge. I once saw a documentary on our Discovery channel's sibbling, about the making of a middle-age catapult. The first real life attempts broke themselves into pieces until they managed to understand archeological evidences and set all ratios back to what they once were, and then put the thing on wheels which were not used to carry the weapon around (as was unanimously beleived), but to handle the recoil. Then, they achieved pretty nice accuracy out of what was thought to be a primitive device.