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Oddities

Technology

Oddities Ghost Ships Technology

A lot of things were developed a lot sooner then generally supposed. Either the original designs were lost, or the technology was ahead of its time and people ignored the implications of the new device. In any case, herewe present several technological items of note that were anomalous for their time period...thus, an oddity.

Leonardo's Robot Knight	1495
The first design for a humanoid robot is probably the Robot Knight, an automaton designed by Leonardo da Vinci -- if built, it was most certainly the first ever manufactured.

Model of a robot based on drawings by Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci is famous for the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper (and other paintings), as well as for designing (but never building), a helicopter, a tank, a submarine and many other advanced machines. He also studied anatomy, physics, and mechanics. Leonardo had created deigns for other forms of robots as well: a walking mechanical lion (that had a spray of flowers emerge from its chest) and a programmable spring-powered cart. However, none of these devices can compare to the Robot Knight, an artificial cable-and-pulley-driven man, fully programmable in an analog, mechanical sense. It was the Disney animatronics of its day.

Leonardo first conceived the robot when was just 12 years old, around 1464. But it wasn't built -- if indeed it was -- until just prior to the period of the Last Supper, in 1495. One of his least-known designs, it was probably developed during his extensive studies of anatomy and kinaesthetics (while in Florence) and based on his dissections of the human body. He most likely created the robot to prove to himself that the frame of a human body could be imitated -- an extension of his hypothesis that the human body is a machine in structure (which we now understand it as a chemically-based machine) and that it's complex movements could be simulated by the use of pulleys and levers. It seems evident that Leonardo's anatomical research in the Canon of Proportions (as illustrated in the Vitruvian Man) also contributed to his design process.

Modern-day reconstruction of Leonardo's Robot Knight.

The entire robotic system is in an analogue programmable format that operates through a series of pulleys and cables -- power to the arms is supplied through the chest, while the legs use an external system. No one is sure what power source Leonardo used, but it was probably water or weights driven by a crank. The robot is composed of two subsystems: a four-factor scheme that controls the hands, wrists, elbows and shoulders and a tri-factor system (powered by a crank via a cable), which controls the hips, knees and ankles. The robot knight could stand, sit up, raise its visor and independently maneuver and wave its arms, move its head from side-to-side (via a fully articulated neck), open and close its jaw (which was anatomically correct), walk. and was most likely planned to be able to mimic combat gestures. In addition, the robot may have produced sound through the use of automated musical instruments such as drums.

No one knows for sure if this invention was ever built, but it is believed that Leonardo had a working model that he exhibited at a celebration in the court of Milan. This would have been hosted by his patron, Duke Lodovico Sforza, a man who enjoyed amazing his guests with novelties and who was also interested in military warfare. Appropriately, the mechanical man was dressed in a suit of German-Italian armor from the late fifteenth century. Leonardo’s robot would have been the highlight of the party with Leonardo at the helm of the crank powering the robot to move.

A page from one of Leonardo's design journals.

Sadly, the Robot is lost or was destroyed long ago; the finished robot drawings are probably among the more than 14,000 pages of Leonardo's work which are still unknown to us. Experts have no definitive proof that this machine progressed beyond Leonardo's initial sketches. However, the design notes for the robot appear randomly scattered throughout several previously unknown sketchbooks -- primarily the Codex Huygens that was considered lost until it was rediscovered in 1950 by Italian scholar Carlo Pedretti. An additional forty years went by before the components of the system Leonardo used for automatically controlling limb movements were identified among the sketches.

In the early 1990s, the-Institute and Museum of the History of Science (based in Florence, Italy) designed computer models to establish the feasibility of Leonardo's sketches. These simulations clearly confirmed that the drawings were for a mechanical robot. Some time later, they actually built the robot, based faithfully on Leonardo's design; this proved it was fully functional, with the exception that the escapement mechanism was flawed; the robot started working really fast and then just ran out of steam.

In 2002, the BBC invited an expert on robotics named Mark Rosheim to build a prototype, based on his five years of research into Leonardo's robot sketches. Rosheim accepted the challenge and produced a model was able to walk (one large gear had cams and the other didn't, producing a left-to-right zig-zag motion) and wave. Rosheim went on to further adapt Leonardo's designs for NASA, calling the updated machines 'anthrobots.'

Leonardo Robot Knight Video

Source: Research & text by Geoffrey Reiss