Leonardo da Vinci sketched an armored tank as a conical military vehicle driven by people.
The design appears in Leonardo’s notebooks from the late fifteenth century. Its sloping, conical cover was intended to deflect incoming projectiles, while several cannons projected through openings around the vehicle. Crank-operated wheels inside would have allowed a group of men to move it across a battlefield.
The machine was never built in Leonardo’s lifetime, and it was not a practical modern tank. Historians often point out that the original drawing contains a gearing problem that would make the proposed mechanism move backward unless corrected. The vehicle is therefore best understood as a speculative armored fighting machine rather than an operational invention.
It is sometimes called Leonardo’s tank, although Leonardo himself did not use the modern word “tank.” The concept predates twentieth-century tanks by more than four centuries.