Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for carbonizing the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the charred layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects and fungi, thus extending the life of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it appears that Italian Renaissance Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the protective benefits of charring wood surfaces more than a hundred years earlier, according to an article published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU-funded research.
Check the notes
As previously reported, Leonardo produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later collected into codices), of which less than a third have survived. The notebooks contain all kinds of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, rockets, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges to clean harbors and canals, and floating footwear, similar to snowshoes, that allows a person to walk on water. Leonardo foresaw the possibility of building a telescope in his Codex Atlanticus (1490) – he wrote of “making spectacles to see the moon enlarged” a century before the invention of the instrument.
In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy's Museo Ideale, came across some recipes for mysterious mixtures while looking through Leonardo's notes. Vezzosi experimented with the recipes, resulting in a mixture that hardened into a material that looked eerily similar to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 20th century. So Leonardo may have invented the first man-made plastic.
The notebooks also contain detailed notes by Leonardo on his extensive anatomical studies. In particular, his drawings and descriptions of the human heart captured how heart valves can control blood flow, 150 years before William Harvey worked out the basic principles of the human circulatory system. (In 2005, a British heart surgeon named Francis Wells pioneered a new procedure to repair damaged hearts based on Leonardo's heart valve sketches and subsequently wrote the book Leonardo's heart.)
