What automated soldier did Leonardo da Vinci design in 1495?

Leonardo da Vinci’s automated soldier design from 1495 was the mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the humanoid machine for a festival or court entertainment associated with Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The machine wore armor and was intended to sit, stand, raise its arms, move its head, and open and close its jaw. Cables, pulleys, gears, and a supporting structure inside the armor controlled these movements.

The surviving drawings were rediscovered in the twentieth century, and engineer Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction in 2002. The reconstruction showed that Leonardo’s mechanism was mechanically plausible, although the exact historical performance remains uncertain because no contemporary record conclusively documents the machine operating.

The mechanical knight is often called a robot, but that modern word can mislead. It was not programmable in the modern electronic sense. It was an automaton: a machine designed to perform predetermined movements through mechanical linkages and stored motion.