Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring wood surfaces. It has grown popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized coating shields wood from moisture, flames, insects, and fungi, thereby extending its useful life. Yakisugi methods were first recorded in writing in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci appears to have remarked on the protective effects of charring wood more than a century earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU funded research.
Consult the notes
As previously reported, Leonardo filled more than 13,000 pages with observations and sketches (later compiled into codices), fewer than a third of which survive. The notebooks describe a wide range of inventions that anticipated later technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges for clearing harbors and canals, and flotation devices similar to snowshoes to enable a person to walk on water. In his Codex Atlanticus (1490) Leonardo even speculated about making a telescope—he wrote of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged” roughly a century before the instrument was developed.
In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, discovered some recipes for obscure mixtures while paging through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi tried the formulas and produced a compound that hardened into a material remarkably like Bakelite, the synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. That raises the possibility that Leonardo effectively created the first manmade plastic.
The notebooks also include Leonardo’s meticulous observations from his anatomical studies. Most strikingly, his drawings and descriptions of the heart illustrated how valves regulate blood flow a century and a half before William Harvey described the fundamentals of the circulatory system. (In 2005, British heart surgeon Francis Wells developed a new operation to repair damaged hearts inspired by Leonardo’s valve sketches and later authored the book The Heart of Leonardo.)
