Da Vinci designed a robot?! Wow!
A story in this month’s Wired mag. This is fascinating!
Da Vinci enthusiasts have reconstructed the automobile several times during the past century, but it’s never worked. The device seemed destined to join the ranks of da Vinci’s grandiose but flawed inventions - what one scholar called his “impossible machines.”
To Rosheim, the machine was hardly impossible. Immersing himself in the minutiae of each sketch, gleaning inspiration from inventions that came later, he concluded that the device was not simply a spring-powered cart - as novel as that might be for 1478 - but something more radically innovative. Da Vinci’s automobile, Rosheim maintains, is actually a robot with its own set of programmable instructions. This “precursor to mobile robots,” Rosheim suggests, might even be “the first record of a programmable analog computer in the history of civilization.” — via Slashdot, BBC.