Airdate: Leonardo: The Man Who Saved Science

On Monday SBS screens PBS documentary Leonardo: The Man Who Saved Science.

It suggests many of his ideas may have been realised long before he sketched them out in his notebooks — some even 1,700 years before. Was Leonardo a copycat?

Leonardo Da Vinci has gone down in history as much for his art as he has for his inventions. His extensive notebooks are crammed with diagrams of complex self-propelled machines, ingenious weapons, innovative architecture and manufacturing equipment.

But researchers delving into ancient manuscripts have discovered drawings and treatises that pre-figure many of the inventions long attributed to Leonardo. In fact, multiple versions of Leonardo’s ‘inventions’ have been traced back to classical Greece, the Arab Empire and even ancient China.

In this programme, we reveal how Leonardo built a bridge between the ancient past and an unknown future. We will show how his insatiable curiosity drove him to seek out scientific and technological knowledge lost to European culture, how he questioned it, and through his own exacting observations and experiments, transformed, augmented and concentrated it to help launch a new scientific age. This documentary is the story of the making of the world’s first scientist.

Monday, 9 April at 7.30pm on SBS