Elenco SelfPropelled Cart - Manual (Page 10)

8
Da Vinci Drawings Come To
Life Five Centuries Later
Da Vinci’s plans for the self-propelled cart were discovered in 1905 by Girolamo Calvi,
an Italian academic and pioneer of modern Da Vinci studies. Calvin later jokingly
referred to the cart as “Leonardo’s Fiat.”
It was not until 1997, Professor Carlo Pedretti, one of the leading authorities on
Leonardo Da Vinci, teamed with American robotics expert Mark Rosheim, and set to
work creating models of the self-propelled cart. The model took seven years to build as
an operable moving device. A pivotal discovery came when Pedretti identified drawings
of coiled springs concealed in drums beneath the car as its most likely source of power.
The models were featured in an exhibition at Florence's Science History Museum
where several viewers of the finished work commented that the vehicle's resembled
NASA's Spirit, a space vehicle used on Mars.