The Witte Museum recently held a Leonardo DaVinci exhibit. It was the coolest one they've had in our opinion. The animated dinosaurs came close.

In case you aren't familiar with DaVinci, he was the one who painted the famous Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. He was a man with a mind before his time. He was an artist, an engineer and an inventor. An interesting kids read is a book called Leonardo's Horse by Jean Fritz.

This is the legendary Witte elephant where all kids must take a picture. They can't walk by and resist a seat on the elephant.

The DaVinci exhibit was divided into five sections. Four of the sections were devoted to DaVinci's ideas sorted by air, water, fire and earth. The fifth room was Leonardo's workshop where there were hands-on activities for kids.

Air inventions obviously had to do mostly with flying. His ideas were basis for many flying objects that are in use today. He did not design a workable idea until he was near the end of his life when he started think along the lines of a single stationary wing.

He also came up with ideas for measuring wind speed and weather conditions. The two pics below are interesting ideas for anemometers.

The water inventions focused on ideas for machines using water like the water saw pictured below. The machines in the background use water to create motion for gear and pulleys and such. To the left is an idea built upon Archimedes Screw designed to bring water up a pipe from a water source below.

The fire section contained DaVinci's ideas for fire power that could be used during war. Below is an idea for a very early mobile tank.

This is a cannon.

In the earth room were several simple machines.

This is an olive oil press. Olive oil was very important in Italy especially during that time.
More simple machines. This is the basic idea for a ball bearing.
Here's a pulley system. DaVinci used a lot of his machines in his theatrical presentations. People loved to see things in motion. He used this type of pulley system to lift very heavy props.
On to Leonardo's workshop...

Ah, the catapult. We had fun with this one.

We got some hands-on experience with arches. How important do you think that keystone is to the structural integrity of an arch. We got to build this... and knock it down.

One last thing that was very fun was the temporary bridge. There was a full size bridge between the water and fire displays. In the workshop, they had a small version that we could build. A museum attendant was there to assist. She had a very lovely accent... possibly Australian. She was very good about assisting the kids with this difficult project.

They also had short videos in clever picture frames on the walls. These were very interesting. And there was a large screen video about DaVinci.

Overall, this display was fascinating and a wonderful application to some studies we have done on DaVinci. This exhibit ended on Sept 7th, but we look forward to future displays. They're always a lot of fun!