On April 15, 1452, in a small Tuscan village called Vinci, a baby boy named Leonardo was born. He grew up sketching birds, lizards, and rivers, and as a teenager he became an apprentice to a Florence artist named Verrocchio. According to legend, Leonardo painted an angel into one of his teacher's paintings that was so beautiful, Verrocchio put down his brush and decided to focus on sculpture instead.
Leonardo da Vinci became the original Renaissance superstar. He painted the Mona Lisa, with her mysterious half-smile, and The Last Supper, a giant mural showing Jesus and his disciples at dinner. But painting was only one of his skills. His notebooks - about 13,000 surviving pages - are crammed with sketches of helicopters, parachutes, scuba gear, tanks, and submarines, all hundreds of years before anyone built them. He dissected human bodies to draw exactly how muscles, hearts, and lungs worked.
Leonardo wrote his notes in mirror-writing, backward from right to left, possibly to keep his ideas private (or maybe just because he was left-handed). Many of his inventions stayed on paper - the materials of his time couldn't actually build a helicopter - but his curiosity about everything from rivers to anatomy showed what one human brain could imagine. Today his paintings hang behind bulletproof glass and engineers still pore over his notebooks for inspiration. Leonardo proved that being curious about everything is its own kind of genius.
