Leonardo da Vinci designed a chain pump to lift water with buckets attached to a continuous chain.
In a chain pump, a looped chain carries a series of small containers or paddles upward through a pipe or channel. As the chain moves, the containers raise water from a lower level to a higher one. Leonardo studied and drew mechanisms of this kind as part of his broader work on hydraulics and machines.
A chain pump is not the same as the Archimedes’ screw, which raises water through a rotating helical surface. Nor is it identical to a noria, whose wheel carries containers around its rim. Those devices can all move water, but their operating mechanisms differ.
Leonardo’s hydraulic studies connected practical engineering with careful observation of water flow. His notebooks contain many proposals for canals, pumps, locks, and lifting machinery, although individual drawings do not always prove that he invented the underlying mechanism from nothing.