Diving and Floating Craft, Screws, and Scattered Notes
A crowded sheet of double-hull and submersible boats, endless screws, an optical note and satirical prose
This densely worked sheet, drawn on blue paper and inscribed in mirror-script, gathers designs for double-hull and submersible watercraft with inflatable bags (baghe) and air-versus-sand ballast, alongside endless screws worked by rods and cranks for pulling and pushing. A short optical maxim, weight labels (up to 20,000 pounds), and a column of numbers accompany the mechanisms. Interspersed are natural-philosophical and satirical passages, including a riddle on generation and a joke about Lombardy and bearded women. Several drawings and numeric jottings on the sheet extend beyond the passages transcribed here.
On this page
Double-hull craft with air and sand ballast
A double-hull vessel is labelled with ballast values: air holds for 1000, sand for 4000. The instruction reads that when you wish to stay on the surface you inflate a bag (baga) and draw the weight below up toward you, and so move along.
Endless screw for pulling and pushing
A system of screws, rods and cranks is annotated as an endless screw (vite senza fine) serving both to pull and to push.
Length as a cause of weakness in the screw
A note beside an undefined apparatus reasons that because length gives cause for weakness, one should build it in this way and keep the screw short.
An object seen against a white ground
A single optical maxim states that an object placed between the eye and another bright white object diminishes by half of its apparent size.
A riddle on generation
A question set beside the half-figure inside the submersible asks: for what reason are animal seeds sown with pleasure, and the receiver receives with pleasure, yet gives birth in pain?
Satirical note on Lombardy
A passage in the upper margin of the left face runs that Lombardy devours the thirty thousand, and a thousand foot-soldiers and horses and hangmen, and that there are many women there who have beards.