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A compilation of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks - Codex Arundel - was digitized by the British Library and made available to the public. Whilst Leonardo never published his notes, you can look through 570 digitized pages of Codex Arundel here. For hundreds of years, the huge collection of manuscripts remained mostly unseen. After Leonardo's death in France, writes the British Library, his student Francesco Melzi "brought many of his manuscripts and drawings back to Italy. Melzi's heirs, who had no idea of the importance of the manuscripts, gradually disposed of them." Nonetheless, over 5,000 pages of notes "still exist in Leonardo's 'mirror writing', from right to left." These notebooks contain da Vinci's "visions of the aeroplane, the helicopter, the parachute, the submarine and the car. It was more than 300 years before many of his ideas were improved upon."

The British Library's brief series on da Vinci's life and work, including explanations of his diving apparatus, parachute, and glider.