What human-shaped machine did Leonardo da Vinci design with gears, cables, and jointed limbs?

Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight with gears, cables, and jointed limbs.

The human-shaped automaton was created around 1495 during Leonardo’s work for Ludovico Sforza in Milan. It was probably intended for a court spectacle. The machine wore armor and was designed to perform human-like actions, including moving its arms, sitting, and standing through an internal system of pulleys, cables, and gears.

Leonardo’s original mechanical knight was not known to modern historians until drawings and notes were interpreted in the twentieth century. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s surviving designs.

The knight is sometimes described as a robot, but that modern word can be misleading. It was a mechanical automaton, not a programmable electronic machine. Its importance is that Leonardo applied anatomical observation to mechanical movement, arranging parts so that cables and levers could imitate actions of the human body.