Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight in 1495, often called Leonardo’s robot.
The machine was created for a pageant at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Drawings in Leonardo’s notebooks show an armored figure operated by a system of gears, cables, pulleys, and cranks. It could reportedly sit, stand, move its arms, and raise its visor.
The robot was not an electronic machine and did not think independently. It was an automaton, meaning a device that performs movements through mechanical programming. Leonardo’s design is especially notable because its mechanisms were arranged inside a human-shaped suit of armor.
The original machine did not survive. In 2002, robotics expert Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s sketches. The reconstruction helped demonstrate that the design’s basic movements were mechanically plausible, although some details remain interpretive.