Exploring Leonardo Da Vinci's Perpetual Motion Machines

Can perpetual motion be achieved? The search for the perfect machine, which would work indefinitely without an energy source, occupied natural philosophers and engineers from the Middle Ages onward. 

Leonardo has a central place in this story. His designs for perpetual motion machines are intriguing applications of his understanding of the laws of motion and mechanics.

Through animation we explore here the perpetual motion designs appearing on a single sheet of Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus, f. 1062r, a manuscript dating to 1478-1519 which is now located in the Ambrosiana Library, Milan.

This design has 12 articulated arms with weights at the free ends. The mechanical arms are comparable to human arms in skeletal form and Leonardo included a sketch of a human arm at the bottom of the page. See this wheel in motion on the next slide.

In the 19th century, thermodynamics proved that perpetual motion was impossible. But it was Leonardo who first declared its impossibility, comparing the quest for perpetual motion to alchemists' attempts to make gold.

Leonardo explored other options for perpetual motion wheels and worked on more intricate designs. In this sketch, Leonardo draws a wheel that has four continuous channels fixed on an octagonal drum. Running balls in the channels make the wheel turn.

The following designs involve more complex interconnected channels passing through the central axis.

Here we see Leonardo's sketch of a wheel with eight interconnected channels. Smaller structures, each with four channels appear above and below it.

This structure has 4 channels, each with three interconnected loops. 8 running balls make the wheel turn. This design also appears in another Leonardo manuscript, the Codex Forster II, f. 91r.

You many notice a fragment cut out from the bottom right corner of the sheet. The fragment, a sketch of an old man, was probably removed by an early 17th-century collector. It is now held in the Royal Collection Trust.

The final design highlighted in this Codex is a wheel subdivided into 12 compartments. A similar design again appears in the Codex Forster II, f 91v. You'll see it motion on the next slide.

Leonardo's experiments in perpetual motion on this sheet of the Codex Atlanticus demonstrate his visual mode of thinking and his systematic process of investigating an idea.