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Leonardo da Vinci
Discovered Gravity Century
Before Newton
3 minutes

Egor Shapovalov
Leonardo da Vinci was not only one of the world's
greatest artists, but also a sculptor, an architect,
a scientist and an inventor. Many of his practical
and theoretical discoveries turned out to be well
ahead of his time. Moreover, a new study shows
that he may have been ahead of Isaac Newton in
studying gravity.
Pencil sketches made by Leonardo in the early
1500s suggest that he discovered the idea of
gravity long before English mathematician Isaac
Newton, who is credited with the discovery of the
phenomenon in the late 1600s.
Researchers at the California Institute of

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Technology have analyzed Leonardo's notebooks
and found experiments devised by the Italian
which demonstrate that gravity is a form of
acceleration. What's more, it turns out that he
modelled the gravitational constant with 97
percent accuracy.
"About 500 years ago, Leonardo tried to uncover
the mystery of gravity and its connection to
acceleration through a series of ingenious
experiments guided only by his imagination and
masterful experimental techniques," write the
researchers.
The team believes that the only thing that
prevented Leonardo's experiments from
definitively explaining gravity was the limited tools
at his disposal - he lacked the means to measure
accurately when objects fall. The sketches show
experiments demonstrating that gravity is a form
of acceleration.
Morteza Gharib, lead author of the Leonardo
paper, first noticed Leonardo's experiments in the
Codex Arundel, a collection of articles written by
the artist that covered science, art and personal

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topics.
"What caught my eye was when he wrote
'Equatione di Moti' [equalization (equivalence) of
motions] on the hypotenuse of one of his
sketched triangles—the one that was an
isosceles right triangle," says Gharib. "I became
interested to see what Leonardo meant by that
phrase."
The sketches show a pitcher of water moving in a
straight line parallel to the ground, spouting water
or sand. Leonardo's notes explain that when they
spill out of the jug, the contents do not fall at a
constant speed but accelerate.
He also wrote that the contents stop moving
horizontally because the pitcher no longer affects
it, and the acceleration is solely downwards
because of gravity, according to the researchers.
Leonardo tried to describe the acceleration seen
in the sketches mathematically and was 97
percent right.
The study authored by researchers at the
California Institute of Technology was published
in the international journal on art, science and

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technology, Leonardo.

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