Leonardo da Vinci designed an armored vehicle as an early tank concept.
His late-15th-century design shows a conical, covered vehicle mounted on a circular platform. Several angled cannons project through openings around the vehicle, allowing fire in different directions while protecting the crew inside. The machine was intended to move using manually operated cranks connected to wheels.
The design is often called Leonardo’s tank, but it was never built as a working Renaissance battlefield vehicle. A commonly discussed problem is that the gear arrangement in the surviving drawing would make the wheels turn in opposite directions. Some historians suggest this may have been a deliberate mistake to prevent unauthorized construction. The concept is therefore best described as a design for an armored fighting vehicle, not the first modern tank itself.