Leonardo da Vinci designed an odometer to measure the distance travelled by a wheel.
His mechanical odometer used a wheel that turned as a cart moved. Gears transferred the wheel’s rotation to a counting mechanism, allowing the device to record distance in a systematic way. The concept was useful for surveying, mapping, road measurement, and military engineering.
Leonardo’s version is often described as a wheelbarrow-like device with a counting system. Each revolution or set of revolutions advanced a mechanism, turning motion into a numerical reading. This is the same broad principle used by many later mechanical odometers.
An odometer measures distance, not speed. A speedometer reports how fast something is moving, while an anemometer measures wind speed. Leonardo’s invention belongs to the long history of mechanical measurement devices that made travel and terrain easier to quantify.