Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid machine for a Milan court festival is known as the mechanical knight.
Leonardo designed the machine around 1495 while working for Ludovico Sforza in Milan. It was intended for a courtly spectacle and was reportedly capable of sitting, standing, moving its arms, and moving its jaw. Its internal mechanism used cables, pulleys, and gears operated by a human concealed inside or connected to the machine.
No original mechanical knight has survived, and historians have reconstructed its likely appearance from Leonardo’s drawings and notes. The surviving evidence does not establish every detail of the machine’s performance, so modern accounts distinguish the documented design from later reconstruction experiments.
The invention is often called a robot, although that modern term was not used in Leonardo’s time. “Robot” entered English much later, after the Czech playwright Karel Čapek used the word in his 1920 play R.U.R. Leonardo’s machine is better understood as a Renaissance automaton or theatrical mechanical figure.