Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight for a 1495 court entertainment in Milan.
The machine was probably created for festivities organized under Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo’s patron. His notes and drawings indicate a suit of armor containing a system of pulleys, cables, and gears. The mechanism could perform human-like movements such as sitting, standing, moving its arms, and raising its visor.
The robot was not an electronic robot in the modern sense. It was an automaton: a machine whose movements were produced by mechanical components rather than software or electricity. Leonardo’s design is especially notable because it used knowledge of human anatomy to reproduce joint motion.
The original machine disappeared, but engineer Mark Rosheim constructed a full-scale reconstruction in 2002 using Leonardo’s surviving drawings. The reconstruction helped demonstrate that the concept was mechanically plausible.