What human-like machine did Leonardo da Vinci design for a Milanese festival?

Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight, a human-shaped automaton for a Milanese festival.

Leonardo’s notes and drawings from around 1495 show a mechanical figure wearing medieval armor. A system of pulleys, cables, and gears could make the figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw. The design was probably prepared for an elaborate entertainment at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan.

The robot knight was not an electronic robot and did not possess independent intelligence. In Leonardo’s period, an automaton meant a machine capable of programmed or mechanically driven movement. The original device disappeared, but researchers reconstructed it in the 20th century using Leonardo’s surviving sketches. Those reconstructions revealed that the design was more mechanically coherent than many people might expect from a purely conceptual drawing.