Ladislao Reti discovers and publishes Leonardo da Vinci’s original Madrid Codex. It consists of two volumes totaling 197 pages, in which, among other things, he describes perpetual motion as a chimera, describes the best alloy for reducing friction (3 parts copper, 7 parts tin, melted together) three centuries ahead of its time, and concludes that all motions in the universe obey the same physical laws, that man is a machine, a bird is a machine, and the entire universe is a machine. He ridicules astrologers, alchemists, and all those who believe in non-mechanistic explanations of cause and effect, and relegates the idea of miracles to the realm of the priests.
