John: The Leonardo Machines and The Galileo Gallery

Although we visited these galleries on different days, I thought they would go well together in one blog. I was thinking about how I would write the blog as I was looking at the exhibits. Both the exhibitions are kind of "boys toys" stuff, and unless you are into astronomy, applied maths, quantum physics and the like, just reading about the stuff can quickly become eye glazing material. So I thought I would just take a few examples from each exhibition. What did strike me as I looked at them, was that considering the few resources each man had, to work and experiment with, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates with all their technical wizardry were just "beginners" in terms of intellectual prowess. First Da Vinci

Recently on T.V. there has been a show called "Da Vinci's Demons." The creators of the show drew on the actual models and drawings of Da Vinci that were shown in the museum. For example, in the show there were Da Vinci's inventions relating to flight, cannon, and a diver's suit.

The great man also had ideas and inventions relating to other things, all of them original inventions of their time.

And after inventing and creating all these amazing theories and machines, he still had the time and the genius to "dash off" the Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper."

Similarly when looking around the Galileo museum, much of his work and those of his contemporaries was ground breaking stuff at the time. Remember he was so far ahead of his time, that Galileo was charged with heresy for suggesting that the earth went round the sun.

I enjoyed the map room where not only were men trying to draw maps of the known world, (Naturally Australia was not shown) they were trying to work out how to navigate the globe and work out their position on the globe for navigational purposes. 

However, what I enjoyed most was the fact that this museum was filled with the most extraordinary machines and contraptions I had ever seen! They were all proper pieces of scientific equipment to measure real phenomena, air, cylinder rotation and the like. But it was the look of them that got my imagination racing.

 I could imagine that terribly British scientist who makes James Bond's gadgets demonstrating and expounding in his best John Cleese type voice to no one in particular the scientific principles on which each machine was based. Or perhaps Sherlock Holmes running three of these machines at once flat out at an ear deafening level to prove or disprove some theory.

"Holmes, you astound me!"

"Elementary my dear Jonathon!"

 Like any little boy I was totally entranced and fascinated just by the look of some of these contraptions. To see all those fly and cog wheels spinning around with pistons pumping and glass flasks steaming away would have been kid heaven, and just like any little boy I had the same enthusiastic response.

"I want one!"