Feb. 4, 2004 — Leonardo da Vinci not only anticipated the airplane, the life jacket, the intercom and the robot, he also created the first natural plastic, according to an Italian scholar.
Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where the artist was born the illegitimate child of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl in 1452, found Leonardo's recipe for artificial materials in several pages of drawings and notes.
More pseudoscience A site devoted to an analysis of supposed electrical equipment represented by Egyptian carvings.
There are also a series of pages written by Frank Dörnenburg on the Dendera inscriptions starting at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/FDoernenburg/Dendera1.htm and continuing through ***Dendera7.htm. Note this beauty of a quote from page 6:
"An egyptologist may be a specialist in his area, but is he able do detect electrotechnical knowledge in old texts and pictures? Hardly. He would probably never come to the thought, because school book science anyhow categorically excludes this possibility."
This is a classic argument of pseudoscientists (cranks, hucksters, etc.) about scientists: They're too devoted to their discipline's dogma to even consider alternative ideas. Fair enough criticism in its own way, but it unfortunately represents what has come to be a cardboard characterization of science and scientists throughout the 20th century and probably earlier. We've all seen the same basic scenario played out in countless books and movies: The hero is a reclusive, but brilliant researcher who works in near total isolation (usually in his/her home laboratory), who is derided by so-called "experts" in the field for his outlandish theories, but who finally triumphs over his close-minded detractors by showing everyone that he was right all along usually through some near-catastrophic occurrence (such as alien invaders or turning himself into a fly).
This basic storyline is probably only second in popularity to the one where scientists are messing with "things that mankind was not meant to tamper with".
I should interject at this point that one of my favorite current TV shows, "Stargate SG-1", is based on this very premise, as was much of "The X-Files" another favorite. Hey, it's make-believe.
In any case, the Dendera inscriptions are only the latest case of those poor old Egyptologists missing the boat on interpreting their texts. A few years ago, the famous "helicopter hieroglyphs" made the rounds of many an email discussion list. Von Daniken is once again a prominent figure in these debates. Really, if you want to make any money in this profession, just knock off a series of "controversial" books instead of slogging away at academic publications. It's way easier, plus you stand a good chance of someday getting on Oprah.