Leonardo da Vinci sketched an armored tank as a fortified fighting machine.
His design, created in the late fifteenth century, had a conical wooden shell inspired by a tortoise’s protective covering. The vehicle was intended to carry several men and fire weapons through openings around its sloping sides. Cranks and wheels would allow its crew to move it across a battlefield.
The design was never built for Renaissance warfare. Its heavy armor, limited visibility, and difficult propulsion would have created serious practical problems. A frequently repeated story says Leonardo deliberately reversed the gears so the tank could not work, but historians treat that claim cautiously because the drawing may simply contain an error or incomplete engineering details.
The machine is often called a tank today because its enclosed, tracked-looking form resembles modern armored vehicles. It was not a true tank in the twentieth-century military sense: it had wheels rather than continuous tracks and depended on people turning internal cranks.