Leonardo da Vinci’s robotic knight design is commonly associated with the year 1495.
Leonardo created the design while working in Milan for Ludovico Sforza. The surviving sketches show an armored figure with an internal system of pulleys, cables, gears, and levers. A person operating the mechanism could make the figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw.
The machine is often called Leonardo’s robot or Leonardo’s mechanical knight. It was probably intended as a spectacular court entertainment rather than as an autonomous machine in the modern sense. Leonardo’s drawings were rediscovered centuries later, and modern engineers built reconstructions to test whether the mechanism could work.
The year 1495 is an attribution based on the dating of Leonardo’s Milanese project materials and historical context. The design should not be confused with a modern electronic robot: it was a human-powered mechanical automaton.