Flying car
“Only flying is nicer.” As the automaker Opel 50 years ago brought its sporty GT model on the market, flying cars were at best something for whimsy engineers or colorful comic books. Although American racing driver Glenn Curtiss had already made a first draft for such a flying car in 1918, a rolling box from Pitcairn Aircraft made its first round over Washington twenty years later. But the idea did not really stop there. That’s going to change. Because several manufacturers are preparing for a market appearance. In 2019, Chinese carmaker Geely will sell a two-seat car with fold-out wings through its American subsidiary Terrafugia – for a price of half a million dollars. The Slovak company Aeromobile is moving with a 300 hp combustion engine. The third in the Bund is the Dutch company PAL-V. It will try, from 2020 with a three-wheeled and also called gyrocopter two-seater with folding wings to defy the two competitors. Opel, however, one of the car and airplane pioneers of the twenties, is struggling to survive today.
Leonardo’s anniversary
Florence is preparing for an anniversary: the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci on the 2nd of May. It will not be easy to become master of the expected masses of visitors in the capital of Tuscany. But nothing was ever so simple about this man: his life is not, his work not, and even his tomb is puzzles. When he died in 1519 at Clos Lucé Castle in Amboise, France, the Renaissance lost its greatest genius. He had designed fantastic machines and built huge plants, he could write in mirror writing, he studied mathematics, built flying machines, designed the first helicopter and the first car; he painted in oil, drew with the pen and gave the world some of her greatest works of art: the Lord’s Supper, the Mona Lisa, the Vitruvian man. To this day, he employs the scholars, until today, they could not decode him in detail, even today, the whereabouts of his bones is uncertain. For his grave in the Amboiser church Saint-Florentin was demolished by Napoleon’s soldiers in the French Revolution, including the church. Half a century later, they unearthed the remains, found a skeleton, buried it in the chapel of Saint-Hubert and laid a heavy tombstone inscribed “Leonardo da Vinci” above it.