On Wednesday, December 2nd, we discussed about our new topic, “inventors and inventions”. We watched a few short animated videos about Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo Da Vinci and talked about what inventors have in common, as well as what their personalities are like.
In the video, it was said that, although Benjamin Franklin was never President, he served many roles throughout his lifetime, such as being one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, as one of the five members of the Declaration Committee, which wrote the Declaration of Independence, negotiating the Treaty of Paris with England after the revolutionary war, and serving in the Constitution Convention. He was a great writer, printer, diplomat, and scientist, as well an inventor. He was born in 1706 to a large family in Boston and at age fifteen started helping to write articles for his brother’s newspaper, “The New England Courant”. After this experience he traveled to Philadelphia then on to London to complete his training as a printer. After this accomplishment he went back to Philadelphia and took over a newspaper called “The Pennsylvania Gazette”, wrote “Poor Richard’s Almanack”, poems, weather information, astronomy, and astrology. Not only did he write a lot, he also invented the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, made the first maps of the Gulf Stream and proved that lightning was a form of electricity by flying a kite in a thunderstorm. In 1790, as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, he sent a petition to congress, but died a few months later at the age of eighty-four.
Nowadays, Leonardo Da Vinci is seen as a “Renaissance Man”, which can be described as someone who is good in many different areas. He was born near Florence, Italy in 1452 and was known as a sculptor, architect, inventor, engineer, painter, and scientist, as well as a mathematician. He kept all his notes in secret and wrote in mirror script, which is writing upside down and backwards, to make sure his work was protected. He didn’t create many paintings, but he is well known for both “The Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa”, which is hanging in the Louvre in Paris, France. The Mona Lisa is known for two painting techniques which are sfumatio and chiaroscuro. Sfumato is when different colors are blended carefully to create a cloudy effect and chiaroscuro is when you use light and dark colors to create a three-dimensional effect. Some of his drawings designed inventions that couldn’t be built at that time, but showed lots of observations, which also led to scientific discoveries, like the movement of the eye, as well as others. After Da Vinci’s death in 1519, his drawings showed his interest in many areas, such as human anatomy, starrs and planets, animals, architecture, fossils, and geography.
After watching these two animated movies, we thought of things that Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo Da Vinci had in common, as well as other inventors. We thought that in order to be an inventor you should have the intelligence, creativity, and risk taking, as well as the observation skills.
