Good point Demetrios - Leonardo may have drawn flying machines, but no one ever USED 'em. But it sounds like an interesting episode, all the same. I've been reading about late-antique Constantinople, and apparently a mechanical genius there managed to create a pneumatic chair for the Emperor - solid gold, silver, and jewels, and it could raise 6-8 feet into the heavens to impress the hell out of representatives from Attila the Hun and others who needed to be impressed. After all, our own SPQR game, which started all this back in 1996, spent a great deal of time talking about the mechanical inventions of the Romans, whether theoretical or actual, and how close they could come to something we'd view as 'modern.'