If you judge him by his own elaborate metrics, Leonardo da Vinci was a failure.
Long before the Mona Lisa became shorthand for genius, Leonardo imagined himself as something else entirely: a military engineer, a designer of bridges and armoured vehicles, a master of siegecraft and architecture.
In 1482, he wrote a breathless letter to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, itemising these talents with bravado and noting, quickly, that oh, he could paint, too. Many of his boldest designs never left the page, or arrived centuries too early to be built. By his own standards, the future-facing polymath fell short.
In this episode, Elizabeth Day and Dan Jones roam through history’s workshops, laboratories, monasteries, and battlefields to ask what failure really looks like.
From Leonardo’s unrealised machines to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s accidental discovery of microbiology, from champagne’s explosive beginnings to gunpowder’s grim transformation, they trace how curiosity, misjudgement, and wrong turns can quietly reshape the world. What emerges is a gentler, stranger truth: failure is often just invention, waiting for the world to catch up.
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As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al are dissecting the biggest historical failures as submitted by the royal favourites. In this episode, they discuss history’s colossal maritime failures, from the White Ship disaster to the Titanic.
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A Sony Music Entertainment production.
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Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day
Producer - Alan Weedon
Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman
Researcher - Phoebe Joyce
Executive Producer - Simon Poole
Executive Producer - Louisa Field
Executive Producer - Dan Jones
Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day
Production Manager - Jen Mistri
Production Coordinator - Eric Ryan
Head of content - Chris Skinner
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