On the anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight, today’s picture is a design for an early experimental prototype of a flying machine. It was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci sometime during the mid-1490s but only came to light after his death. He hid such work jealously from his contemporaries, scared that they might steal his ideas. In 1596, while making plans to build a version of the machine shown here, Leonardo wrote himself a memo: “Close up with boards the room above and make the model large and high … If you stand upon the roof at the side of the tower the men at work upon the cupola of the neighbouring cathedral will not see you.”

In late fifteenth-century Milan, Leonardo was just one of a large number of freelance artists, engineers and other Renaissance men of ingenuity competing for work at the court of the Sforza. If he could design the first fully functioning flying machine his reputation would be made. “The great bird will take its first flight,” he wrote dreamily, “filling the world with stupor and all my writings with renown, and bringing glory to the nest where it had been born.”

Leonardo always referred to his design as “the great bird”. It is not strictly speaking an aeroplane but an ornithopter, modelled on avian anatomy and motion. “A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law,” he believed, “which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements…” The daring (and extremely energetic) aeronaut was intended to occupy the pod between the two wings in Leonardo’s design. Then, using a system of rods, ropes and levers – somewhat schematically indicated in his drawing – he was to heave or row away with sufficient vigour to cause the machine’s...

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