Leonardo’s wood charring method predates Japanese practice
Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for carbonizing the surface of wood. It has become very popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects and fungi, thus extending the life of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it appears that Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian Renaissance mathematician, wrote about the protective benefits of charring wooden surfaces more than 100 years earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU-funded research.
Check the notes
As previously noted, Leonardo produced over 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later collected into codices), of which less than a third survive. The notebooks contain all kinds of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges to clean harbors and canals, and floating snowshoe-like shoes to allow a person to walk on water. Leonardo had foreseen the possibility of building a telescope in his Atlantic Codex (1490) — he wrote about “making glasses to see the moon enlarged” a century before the invention of the instrument.
In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Italian Ideal Museum, came across recipes for mysterious mixtures while leafing through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi experimented with these recipes, resulting in a mixture that would harden into a material eerily close to bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. So it could be that Leonardo invented the first synthetic plastic.
The notebooks also contain Leonardo’s detailed notes on his extensive anatomical studies. Most notably, his drawings and descriptions of the human heart illustrate how heart valves can control blood flow 150 years before William Harvey laid out the basis of the human circulatory system. (In 2005, a British heart surgeon named Francis Wells pioneered a new procedure for repairing damaged hearts, based on Leonardo’s sketches of heart valves and later wrote the book Leonardo’s heart.)
