Forget Silicon Valley. The true birthplace of tech disruption was 15th-century Florence, in a workshop filled with sketches, gears, and probably a very stressed apprentice sweeping up parchment.
Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t just painting the Mona Lisa — he was prototyping flying machines, robots, and tanks centuries before anyone had the common decency to invent Wi-Fi. If The Tech Ledger is about exposing waste and reframing genius, then Leonardo is our man: a visionary who could sketch a future most of us are still failing to build properly.
Here’s a taster from his back-catalogue of “inventions”
• The Ornithopter – Flapping wings powered by human legs. Basically, Peloton with added death-wish.
• The Self-Propelled Cart – A clockwork car that ran for 40 metres. Less “autonomous vehicle,” more “shopping trolley with delusions of grandeur.”
• The Diving Suit – Leather, tubes, and inflatable bladders. Scuba gear if your local tailor and a bottle of chianti designed it after choir practice.
• The Giant Crossbow – 75 feet of “don’t mess with us.” The medieval equivalent of signing Cristiano Ronaldo just to sell shirts.
• The Armoured Vehicle – A turtle-shaped tank that never rolled, but still had better governance than most corporate IT programmes.
• The Mechanical Knight – A robot soldier that waved its arms and moved its jaw. Already more engaging than most AI-generated playlist intros on Spotify.
None of it made it to mass production — but that’s not the point. The magic is the mindset: blend art, science, and “what if?” thinking when everyone else is sharpening ploughs.
At TTL, we call this the Da Vinci Principle:
• Don’t wait for the technology to exist.
• Scribble down the impossible.
• Let someone else figure out if it flies, scores, or explodes.
Leonardo didn’t just think outside the box. He dismantled it, fitted it with gears, and tried to make it walk onto a football pitch accompanied by a lute solo. Half his sketches looked like failures, but five centuries later we’re still catching up.
So, who’s doodling in the margins of your organisation? And will you let them, or will you bench them like an unused sub in a cup final?
Whenever I think of Renaissance my mind goes to Leon Battista Alberti, the renaissance man, technophile and polymath who claimed to be able to jump over a standing man as one of his talents… we’ve moved on quite a bit since the 15th Century, still looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible as fallible humans…