Motion and impetus, the bow's force, and a bridge of boats
With aerial perspective at one hour of day and why a pontoon bridge breaks in mid-stream
This large sheet, mounted from three fragments, gathers Leonardo's notes on motion and force. He states that a driven body's motion is inversely proportional to its mover's power, that the force of a bow is pyramidal like that of a bombard, and that every motion carried by another holds two impetuses, its own and its mover's. Other passages treat how rising water thickens into a pyramid, why a river runs fastest at its middle and surface, and why a pontoon bridge is therefore weakest and breaks at mid-stream. A pencil box at the head describes the reddish, hazy air of the sky one hour into the day, an observation of aerial perspective.
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Aerial perspective: the reddish, hazy sky one hour into the day
At one hour of day the air near the horizon has a middling darkness of reddish clouds, growing dark toward the west while the moist eastern horizon is clearer. The white of buildings is barely discernible to the east, and the farther they recede at midday the darker and more reddish they become; trees show more in their crowns than at their feet because the air thickens below.
A driven body's motion is inversely proportional to its mover
Whatever moves by means of another makes a motion proportional to its mover, but in inverse proportion: if the moved has a power of one and the mover a power of a hundred, the moved will travel a hundred while the mover moves one. Leonardo adds that impetus is born equally from weight and from force.
The force of the bow is pyramidal, like the bombard
The force of the bow is pyramidal, and so likewise is that of the bombard. In a lettered figure two bows equal in shape and power are shown: if one, on releasing, imparts its force to the other, it lends it neither more nor less than half. A related note remarks how bowstrings and lute strings should be made.
Every motion moved by another carries two impetuses
Sometimes two impetuses are equal, sometimes one is greater. Every motion moved by another has two impetuses, its own and that of its mover; when the mover's impetus fails, the body's own remains.
Rising water thickens into a pyramid as it loses impetus
A moving thing goes up, down, across or obliquely; moving up it loses velocity at every degree, moving down it loses the given impetus and gains its own natural motion. If it be water, going up it thickens the more it moves until a pyramid is formed where it takes its first velocity.
Why a bridge of boats breaks in mid-stream
Because a river runs fastest at the middle of its width and more at the surface than the bottom, a mobile bridge built on boats is of itself weakest in the middle of its length. The greater weakness joined to the greater percussion of the water, Leonardo concludes, means the bridge will break in the middle; the boats should lie lengthwise along the current for easier movement.
