Aerial Screw

Hello. I am a very special drawing. My name is the Aerial Screw. I look like a giant, twirly top. A wonderful artist and inventor named Leonardo da Vinci dreamed me up. That was a long, long time ago in the late 1480s. Leonardo loved to watch birds fly and seeds spin down from trees. He looked at the big blue sky and had a big, happy dream. He wondered if people could fly, too. I was his drawing of a flying machine.

Leonardo drew me with a big wooden circle on the bottom for people to stand on. A tall pole stands right in my middle. A giant, spiraling sail made of cloth wraps all around the pole. Whoosh. Leonardo's big idea was that four people would run around on the platform. They would push handles to make my sail spin very, very fast. As I spun, I would push the air down, down, down. That would lift me up, up, up into the sky. I would twirl through the air just like a spinning seed from a maple tree.

For many, many years, I was mostly an idea in a special notebook. Leonardo even made small flying models of me. But a big me, one that could carry people, couldn't be built back then. They did not have the right things to make me light and strong. But my dream did not disappear. It waited. Today, people look at Leonardo's drawing and see that I look like a very early idea for a helicopter. They have built flying models based on my design, and they really fly. So, even though I started as a drawing, my twirly idea shows that an amazing dream can keep flying for hundreds of years.