Leonardo da Vinci designed a pedometer to count a person’s steps while walking.
His concept used a weighted mechanism that moved with the walker’s body. Each step caused the mechanism to advance a counting system, allowing the user to estimate the number of steps taken. Leonardo’s design belongs to his wider interest in measuring motion through simple mechanical transformations.
A pedometer differs from an odometer even though both count movement. A pedometer counts steps taken by a person, while an odometer records distance traveled by a vehicle or wheel. The two devices may use related ideas, but they answer different measurement questions.
Leonardo’s pedometer is known from his mechanical drawings rather than from a surviving device that can be tested today. It illustrates how Renaissance engineers explored personal measurement before electronic sensors and digital displays existed.