Leonardo Da Vinci's Bad Ideas

Editor please stop the glitch fades

Terry pratchett had the best description of da Vinci with the character Leonard of quirm. Who is constantly unconsciously doodling terrible functional world changing machines in the margins of books without really being conscious of what he had created

He's one Donatello short of Ninja Turtles.

7:28 To quote Fry and professor Farnsworth in Futurama: Fry: "Wow, could that thing really fly!?" Farnsworth: "Of course not, that thing is as aerodynamic as a sofa!"

In his biography of Leonardo, Walter Isaacson discusses that Leonardo earned most of his income by staging stage plays. Some historians theorize the many of Leonardo's inventions were designs for stage props. Several of the flying machines look like that could be plausible. Of course that's just a theory. But I think it is an interesting one.

That "digital distortion" effect is annoying af .. bzzzzt!

If he had developed a working diving suit, people would've figured out a use for it. To call it a "bad idea" because it didn't make it past the red tape is simply wrong.

Feels weird to hear Simon talk about Da Vinci without telling a story about how thought it was Da Vin-see for the longest time

They should have titled this, "Leonardo Da Vinci's Good Ideas, Most of Which Worked With Some Fine Tuning".

The most important thing I learned from this is that even da Vinci felt the need to pad his resume.

No use for a functional diving suit in the 1500s. Hmm... The primary use for the first successful diving suits was salvage operations. As such, if Leonardo's design worked, it would have found some happy customers.

the diving suit would have worked well for looting the ships sunk by a cannon ball.

I think the point is that Da Vinci was able to produce concepts so far ahead of their time that the technology necessary to produce them had not even been invented yet. I don't see any of this as a failure.

Just some feedback from 1 random viewer. I stumbled over the channel a couple of weeks ago, and ended up bingewatching also most every video dating back 1½ year or so. :-) In other words; I really like your content. However, lately you've started using some sort of "breaking up effect", And I can't say why, but it really gets under my skin. To the point where I don't really want to keep watching, because all i'm thinking about, is preparing myself for the next time it comes. It's like nails at a charkboard. 😞

As brilliant as he was he was entitled to make a few mistakes and bad inventions. Most of us can't say the same thing.

Wow. No advertisements. This is a first in forever. Thx, Simon.

The fact that he thought of diving suits at that time is more than mind-blowing!

Simon of Kent, the renaissance man of YouTube

4:20 I get it!!! It was to destroy ships carrying gold and then being able to bring up their valuable resources, for which the army would benefit greatly through reinvesting the income into warfare, damaging the economy of the opposition, or even potentially recovering weapons for reuse.

There was a show on discovery channel where they built some of his designs, including that tank, pretty cool, most worked, they fixed flaws in some designs and made them work. Really good show