Leonardo da Vinci designed an automatic loom to automate parts of textile production.
A loom holds warp threads under tension while a shuttle carries weft thread across them. Leonardo’s concept used mechanical motion to coordinate repetitive operations, reducing the manual effort needed to produce woven cloth.
The design reflects his broader interest in mechanizing labor. He analyzed timing, cams, gears, and moving frames—elements that could make a machine repeat a sequence reliably. The proposal was especially relevant to silk manufacture, an important industry in Renaissance Italy.
Leonardo did not create the fully automated industrial looms used centuries later. His drawings were advanced mechanical studies, and some were never built. The canonical answer is automatic loom because the invention concerns mechanized weaving, not the separate tasks of spinning fiber or printing patterns.