Leonardo da Vinci created masterpieces of art and sculpture. Equally remarkable, his aggregate achievements in engineering, mathematics, anatomy, geology, physics, music, military technology, aeronautics, and a wide range of other fields, not only stood without peer in his own time, but were strikingly prescient for the distant future. He recorded his forward-looking ideas in thousands of notebook pages, known as codices. He produced one codex entirely on flight in 1505-1506, the Codex on the Flight of Birds. Among the many subjects Leonardo studied, the possibility of human mechanical flight held particular fascination. He produced more than 35,000 words and 500 sketches dealing with flying machines, the nature of air, and bird flight. In
