Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight for a 1495 pageant in Milan.
The machine was a humanoid automaton dressed in armor and powered by an internal system of gears, cables, and pulleys. Its mechanisms were intended to reproduce human-like actions, including moving the arms, sitting, standing, and opening or closing the jaw. The design shows Leonardo applying mechanical engineering to entertainment rather than to transportation or warfare.
Leonardo prepared the machine for the court of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. Contemporary documentation about the performance is limited, so historians cannot verify every action the original automaton performed. The design was reconstructed in the twentieth century after researchers studied Leonardo’s anatomical and mechanical drawings.
The robot knight is sometimes called Leonardo’s mechanical knight. It is distinct from his mechanical lion, another courtly automaton reportedly created for a French royal event. Neither machine was a modern electronic robot; both were mechanical automata operated by stored or transmitted motion.