Interesting to see this phrase and yet no mention of the one and only Leonardo Da Vinci! (by the way, the Danes just built a smaller version of a bridge he designed...where did he get all this engineering insight way back then?
Well, there's the supernatural or X-Files-type explanation for Leonardo. Planted by aliens or visitation by aliens.
I read an article years ago which had a much more plausible theory.
Leonardo was just one of those dilettantes who doesn't perhaps understand everything to any great depth, but who has the ability to create new knowledge from the synthesis, in its philosophical sense, of existing knowledge. He was trained as an artist and engineer, the rest followed simply because he had an inquiring - and intelligent - mind. You have to remember that the vast majority of his "inventions" were totally impractical. Our astonishment is at his grasp of the basic principles so long ago rather than at his achievements themselves. What his work did do, however, was to show that there may be a way to make some of these things happen. He thought the previously unthinkable. And perhaps that's where his true genius (aside from his undisputed talent as an artist) lay.
