Is per­pet­u­al motion pos­si­ble? In the­o­ry… I have no idea…. In prac­tice, so far at least, the answer has been a per­pet­u­al no. As Nicholas Bar­ri­al writes at Mak­ery, “in order to suc­ceed,” a per­pet­u­al motion machine “should be free of fric­tion, run in a vac­u­um cham­ber and be total­ly silent” since “sound equates to ener­gy loss.” Try­ing to sat­is­fy these con­di­tions in a noisy, entrop­ic phys­i­cal world may seem like a fool’s errand, akin to turn­ing base met­als to gold. Yet the hun­dreds of sci­en­tists and engi­neers who have tried have been any­thing but fools.

The long list of con­tenders includes famed 12th-cen­tu­ry Indi­an math­e­mati­cian Bhāskara II, also-famed 17th-cen­tu­ry Irish sci­en­tist Robert Boyle, and a cer­tain Ital­ian artist and inven­tor who needs no intro­duc­tion. It will come as no sur­prise to learn that Leonar­do da Vin­ci turned his hand to solv­ing the puz­zle of per­pet­u­al motion. But it seems, in doing so, he “may have been a dirty, rot­ten hyp­ocrite,” Ross Pomery jokes at Real Clear Sci­ence. Sur­vey­ing the many failed attempts to make a machine that ran for­ev­er, he pub­licly exclaimed, “Oh, ye seek­ers after per­pet­u­al motion, how many vain chimeras have you pur­sued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”

In pri­vate, how­ev­er, as Michio Kaku writes in Physics of the Impos­si­ble, Leonar­do “made inge­nious sketch­es in his note­books of self-pro­pelling per­pet­u­al motion machines, includ­ing a cen­trifu­gal pump and a chim­ney jack used to turn a roast­ing skew­er over a fire.”  He also drew up plans for a wheel that would the­o­ret­i­cal­ly run for­ev­er. (Leonar­do claimed he tried only to prove it couldn’t be done.) Inspired by a device invent­ed by a con­tem­po­rary Ital­ian poly­math named Mar­i­ano di Jacopo, known as Tac­co­la (“the jack­daw”), the artist-engi­neer refined this pre­vi­ous attempt in his own ele­gant design.

Leonar­do drew sev­er­al vari­ants of the wheel in his note­books. Despite the fact that the wheel didn’t work—and that he appar­ent­ly nev­er thought it would—the design has become, Bar­ri­al notes, “THE most pop­u­lar per­pet­u­al motion machine on DIY and 3D print­ing sites.” (One mak­er charm­ing­ly com­ments, in frus­tra­tion, “Per­pet­u­al motion doesn’t seem to work, what am I doing wrong?”) The gif at the top, from the British Library, ani­mates one of Leonardo’s many ver­sions of unbal­anced wheels. This detailed study can be found in folio 44v of the Codex Arun­del, one of sev­er­al col­lec­tions of Leonardo’s note­books that have been dig­i­tized and made pub­licly avail­able online.

In his book The Inno­va­tors Behind Leonar­do, Plinio Inno­cen­zi describes these devices, con­sist­ing of “12 half-moon-shaped adja­cent chan­nels which allow the free move­ment of 12 small balls as a func­tion of the wheel’s rota­tion…. At one point dur­ing the rota­tion, an imbal­ance will be cre­at­ed where­by more balls will find them­selves on one side than the oth­er,” cre­at­ing a force that con­tin­ues to pro­pel the wheel for­ward indef­i­nite­ly. “Leonar­do rep­ri­mand­ed that despite the fact that every­thing might seem to work, ‘you will find the impos­si­bil­i­ty of motion above believed.’”

Leonar­do also sketched and described a per­pet­u­al motion device using flu­id mechan­ics, invent­ing the “self-fill­ing flask” over two-hun­dred years before Robert Boyle tried to make per­pet­u­al motion with this method. This design also didn’t work. In real­i­ty, there are too many phys­i­cal forces work­ing against the dream of per­pet­u­al motion. Few of the attempts, how­ev­er, have appeared in as ele­gant a form as Leonardo’s. See the ful­ly scanned Codex Arun­del at the British Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The idea that human beings might not only fly to the moon, but land on its puck­ered sur­face and walk around, seemed like an absolute fan­ta­sy for near­ly all of human his­to­ry. In the exact­ly fifty years since that that very thing hap­pened, “moon shot” has become an almost com­mon­place ref­er­ence for grand, his­toric ges­tures. “Fifty years after Neil Arm­strong walked on the moon, plant­ed an Amer­i­can flag, and flew home,” writes Alex Davies at Wired, “the term moon shot has become short­hand for try­ing to do some­thing that’s real­ly hard and maybe a bit crazy.”

The prob­lem with this, Davies argues, is that the all-eggs-in-one-bas­ket approach does not apply today’s most press­ing, yet most neb­u­lous and glob­al, prob­lems. A “moon shot” cli­mate ini­tia­tive suf­fers from a lack of speci­fici­ty. What exact­ly would it tar­get? How would it mea­sure suc­cess or fail­ure in an unam­bigu­ous way when the prob­lem per­me­ates the econ­o­my, ener­gy, agri­cul­ture, man­u­fac­tur­ing, gov­ern­ment…? A very dif­fer­ent kind of think­ing is required.

Maybe the dualisms of the Cold War made some things sim­pler, in a way. In 1961, John F. Kennedy’s famous artic­u­la­tion of “the goal,” as he put it, could not have been more clear: “land­ing a man on the moon and return­ing him safe­ly to Earth.” You either achieve this, or you don’t. There are no half-mea­sures, and no con­fu­sion about what con­sti­tutes suc­cess. Which brings us to anoth­er prob­lem with turn­ing “moon shot” into a cliché for doing some­thing hard. We for­get just how damned hard it actu­al­ly was.

Land­ing Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin, and pilot Michael Collins on the moon required an expen­di­ture unthink­able today: “NASA spent $25 bil­lion on the Apol­lo pro­gram,” Davies points out, “more than $150 bil­lion in today’s dol­lars.” The U.S. may spend almost sev­en times that on its mil­i­tary in a year, but it’s unthink­able that this nation, or any oth­er, would invest Apol­lo dol­lars in a com­plete­ly unsure thing, with no imme­di­ate poten­tial for con­trol or exploita­tion.

The same might be said of major cor­po­ra­tions. The space­far­ing ambi­tions of today’s titans seem con­ser­v­a­tive by 1961 stan­dards: “More than 400,000 Amer­i­cans worked on [Apol­lo 11] in some capac­i­ty, near­ly all of them in pri­vate indus­try,” writes Davies. The project absolute­ly depend­ed on this coor­di­nat­ed, col­lec­tive lev­el of human inge­nu­ity and exper­tise because the total com­put­ing pow­er of NASA was sev­er­al mil­lions of times less than that of a smart­phone.

From the human “com­put­ers” who plot­ted Apol­lo 11’s course, to the astro­nauts who flew the craft, humans not only designed, mon­i­tored, and exe­cut­ed the mis­sion, but they also had to impro­vise when things went wrong. And they did, in some ter­ri­fy­ing, life-threat­en­ing ways. “The prob­lems began imme­di­ate­ly upon sep­a­ra­tion from the Com­mand Mod­ule in which Arm­strong, Aldrin and Michael Collins had rid­den to the moon,” explains Rod Pyle at Space.com—but, so too did the prob­lem-solv­ing.

To get a bet­ter sense of why the endeav­or was so earth­shak­ing, and how it almost didn’t hap­pen, watch the video above, “Apol­lo 11: The Com­plete Descent.” Part of NASA’s Apol­lo Flight Jour­nal col­lec­tion, the 20-minute nar­rat­ed doc­u­men­tary of the descent and land­ing pro­vides a “detailed account of every sec­ond of the Apol­lo 11 descent and land­ing.” It “com­bines data from the onboard com­put­er for alti­tude and pitch angle, 16mm film that was shot through­out the descent at 6 frames per sec­ond,” and audio trans­mis­sions from the astro­nauts and mis­sion con­trol.

“Most peo­ple knew that going to the moon was risky,” Pyle writes, “but few, very few, knew the scope of the dan­gers that the crew faced.” Fifty years lat­er, we can almost—with only the devices in our pockets—see and hear the orig­i­nal moon shot the way those first few did.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Apol­lo 11 in Real Time: A New Web Site Lets You Take a Real-Time Jour­ney Through First Land­ing on the Moon

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” and the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing Turn 50 This Month: Cel­e­brate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness