2637. Leonardo’s plastic

Dulcie was an enthusiastic “save-the-planet” personage. She had possibly done more than the average Joe Blogs to protect the health of the environment. For example, she was vehemently anti-plastic; and good on her.

Fate has a way of arranging coincidences, and probably for a reason, as this story shall relate. Dulcie had just finished reading that Leonardo da Vinci had written over 13,000 pages of notes in his notebooks of which only about a third had survived.

Anyway, she decided to clean out her attic and came across a great wardrobe of notebooks. She recognized immediately what they were; they were the missing two thirds of Leonardo da Vinci’s 13,000 pages of notes. She recognized them because they were written in Old Italian backwards in Leonardo’s trademark “mirror writing”.

One of the things that had shocked Dulcie earlier when she read about Leonardo was that in 2003 Alessandro Vezzosi, the Director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, had come across in Leonardo’s jottings some recipes for mysterious mixtures. Vezzosi experimented with one of them. Lo and behold! It was the recipe for Bakelight. Leonardo da Vinci had invented plastic hundreds of years before it was officially “invented”.

Yuk! How disgusting. Dulcie was to do her bit for the planet. Over the next few days she took every one of Leonardo’s hitherto missing notebooks and burnt them in the incinerator.

Advertisement