CHAPTER 26 #2
The treatment he had received wasn’t because he had done something wrong when he was a child.
— It was simply because they had never been able to give him more.
This sense of helplessness broke the halo around the labels of "parents," but it also allowed him to truly see many things clearly.
“…You are worthy of love,” she whispered. “You are the best Leonardo.”
He smiled, bending down to kiss her warm lips.
“And you are my salvation, Hedy.”
You allowed me to escape from many things… and in the end, I’ve forgiven myself.
——
The Florence Academy has expanded twice in recent years.
The first expansion occurred when Hedy joined the academic ranks, and Lorenzo made a significant donation, enabling the academy to grow several times in size and accommodate more students in the future.
The second expansion happened when Hedy returned to Florence.
Before she left, she gave them the pea field in the west and taught them how to observe and record their findings.
That year, Hedy also funded the Florence Academy, which led many European scholars to flock there, including a number of women.
Some of them were possibly housemaids seeking refuge, while others were noblewomen passionate about natural research.
Thanks to these factors, the academy became more open and diverse, eventually becoming the center of culture and science on the peninsula.
Numerous papers on microbiology have already been published, and they even started an academic newspaper with columns where students from different factions passionately debated.
The technologies in fermentation and medicine continued to advance, with many incredible discoveries emerging every year.
However, when the lord introduced electricity to them, the previously confident scholars were thrown into a state of doubt.
What is this? What is this again? Why, and why again?
Although the battery formulas were continuously improved, the wise researchers, after long deliberations, reached the conclusion and fearfully submitted their report to the queen.
"—Your Majesty, our current level of understanding is not enough to help you create what you need. This field is vast, like the Milky Way, and we are doing our best to explore it."
Yet, the queen was not angry. What she wanted was a sufficiently stable battery, along with devices for outputting and receiving electricity. It sounded rather rough—these things alone seemed incapable of achieving much, not even providing power or lighting for a small area.
During this time, Leonardo received a commission from the Florence Cathedral and, just as he had promised God when rescuing Hedy, began painting The Last Supper.
The large walls were evenly coated with plaster, and thin, transparent oil paints were continuously applied.
The entire painting would take an extremely long time to complete—each layer of paint could be applied in just one morning, but it might take four or five days for it to fully dry.
On rainy days, waiting up to ten days was not unusual.
Leonardo had gotten used to painting in the morning and assisting with the electrical research in Florence in the afternoon. When the battery and related systems were sufficiently stable, Hedy finally found time to visit.
"This is still far from enough," Leonardo said, clearly feeling some guilt. "It can only be described as a captured form of existence, but it’s not yet the 'energy' you speak of."
"It’s enough," she said with a smile.
"What?" He looked up in surprise, clearly not following the logic. "Why?"
"It’s already capable of communication."
"That’s impossible," Leonardo instinctively rebutted. "Right now, we’ve only established a switch, but it… wait?"
His expression became blank for a moment, and after a while, he muttered, "You’re right—it’s already capable of communication."
People followed instructions to bring copper wires, one five meters long and the other fifty meters long, both purified for conduction.
Leonardo stood on one side of the copper wire and held both ends, while Hedy controlled the switch. When she flipped the switch, a brief electrical current quickly passed through, like a hawk pecking at his palm.
And when she flipped the switch, waited a second, and turned it off, the long electrical current lingered for a second in his palm.
The same occurred with both the five-meter and fifty-meter wires. The speed of the current far surpassed that of horses and human legs, moving like light, freely coming and going.
Once Leonardo realized what had happened, he immediately grabbed paper and pen, rushing to Hedy with an expression of uncontainable joy. "We can communicate with this, right?!"
Hedy, wanting to tease him, responded, "With just a dot and a line, how can we communicate?"
"That’s enough!" Leonardo wrote down examples without hesitation, showing them to her. "A dot, a line—we can mark it as 'a'."
"A line, a dot, that’s 'b'."
"Then we can continue with 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g'—" He looked up, his amber eyes sparkling. "We can totally do this! We can create a reliable codebook and use dots and lines to convey messages!"
A young man standing nearby watched for a while, and seeing the teachers so excited, became a bit confused. "Why go through all that trouble? Why not just talk?"
"This is the fastest way to communicate over long distances," Fabio, the old man next to him, plucked an apricot and threw it at his head. "If we improve this device, we could communicate over five kilometers, understand?"
Not just five kilometers!
While Hedy was still immersed in the unexpected joy of the moment, Leonardo began quickly sketching again.
"And we don’t need the human brain to record these," he said, as his pen formed a typewriter-like mechanism, without her needing to offer any inspiration or guidance.
"The current can travel through metal, and metal interacts with magnets.
As long as we can create a device that lets the current control the rise and fall of two components representing the dots and lines… "
"We can let the machine do the recording." The old man clicked his tongue. "I’ll take care of that part."
This sparked heated discussions across multiple academies. Some even set up copper pipes on the first and fourth floors to test it out. The current easily crossed staircases and land, allowing for brief touches to ask and answer questions.
They even lay on the ground, testing different devices, trying to hear each other’s voices from five floors apart. The development of the telegraph and telecode began in earnest, with some scholars boldly predicting that within a year, they would begin setting up cross-city devices.
People were fascinated by the idea of using dots and lines to represent words, and they called it the "Da Vinci Code."
When Hedy heard the news, she simply lowered her head and smiled, a look of nostalgia crossing her face.
Although modern Italian has only 21 letters—lacking j, k, w, x, and y—it closely resembles Latin. Even if this code were to spread to other countries, it could be widely used and passed down.
—In the future, many will sing his praises.
Leonardo was quite enthusiastic about it, but a hint of regret would also show on his face.
“At least in a few years, people can communicate between Florence and Rome,” he sighed. “But I still feel like it’s not enough.”
Hedy laughed, arranging the flowers she had just cut into a glass vase. “Is this about energy?”
“Do you remember the coal mine I mentioned to you?”
They had initially seized La Spezia, known as the city of sin, and the coal reserves there were far beyond anyone's expectations. But mining and extraction by human power alone were insufficient.
“I’ve got something great to show you,” she said, winking playfully, letting him place a daffodil in her hair.
“What is it?”
“The steam engine.”
“Steam?” Leonardo chuckled. “The thing on the boiler?”
“It’s even more powerful than you think,” Hedy said, taking his hand and leading him into the kitchen.
The kitchen staff all stood up in greeting when they saw the two of them, and she casually nodded at them before guiding him to the nearby boiler.
A pot of soup had just come to a boil, and steam, like white mist, rose as large bubbles burst in the air.
Leonardo observed its form and touched the edge of the pot. “It’s hot.”
“The key point,” she said, pointing directly to the most important aspect, “is that it can move things.”
The man furrowed his brow, thinking for a few seconds, and suddenly his expression changed. He quickly ran off to the laboratory.
In the corner, Machiavelli, who had been sneaking a slice of pizza, finally emerged and tried to express his disapproval. “He just left you like that? You’ve only been married for a few days!”
“Isn’t it cute?” Hedy smiled broadly.
The young man, with a confused expression, picked up his food and went off to find some fruit.
Leonardo began testing the power of steam and the fuel it required. Before discovering this, he had spent much time working on designs for the "perpetual motion machine."
This rumor had been circulating in Europe for two hundred years, sparking intense, fanatical thoughts. If it were possible to create a machine that could rotate endlessly, it would change the entire world.
However, at the time, he had drawn many sketches—those sketches that later she referred to as the "ferris wheel," which ultimately became discarded paper. Friction would consume the energy transferred by these mechanical devices, making perpetual motion impossible.
But this new device, although kinetic energy had its price, was much better than those earlier designs. Steam indeed had powerful propulsion, but the distance it could push wasn't very far.