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When I set myself to the task of writing a historical introductory chapter to my second book, , in the early 1990s, I had learned about Leonardo’s Robot Knight from Carlo Pedretti’s magnificent . I had seen the book in a book store, but it was in Italian and very expensive. Later I found a copy of it used and in English. After digesting it I leapt at the opportunity to delve into Leonardo’s Robot Knight, which was described near the end of the book. Taking a leap of faith that enough material had survived to reconstruct the robot, I made my way to the University of Minnesota’s Rare Books Collection on the top floor of Wilson Library. There, an elderly librarian, tasked with wheeling up from the stacks the twelve elephant folios of the Codex Atlanticus, nearly collapsed his cart beneath the volumes, which weighed several hundred pounds. From this awkward beginning I traced the faint fragments one by one, perhaps even discovering an overlapping figure that had been overlooked by Pedretti, and was able to make a road map of the design and publish the fragments. My book, , which contained the Leonardo material, was well underway but not yet published by the winter of 1994.

My discovery that one of the leg diagrams in Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s was the same as in Madrid MS I had Carlo Pedretti diving into his library as the realization set in that perhaps the missing material had been discovered at last. There had been a controversy when Madrid MS I was discovered in the 1960s about when the missing material may have been removed. Interviews were made and the case closed.

Carlo Pedretti was the first to discover the tell-tale fragments of Leonardo’s Robot Knight in the Codex Atlanticus. My effort to interpret and reconstruct Leonardo’s Knight began with my book and would lead me on an odyssey around the world. It would take me three generations to get it right, finally coming to me in, of all places, my local gym. The armored Robot Knight sat up; opened its arms and closed them, perhaps in a grabbing motion; moved its head via a flexible neck; and opened its visor, perhaps to reveal a frightening physiognomy. Fabricated of wood, brass or bronze and leather, it was cable operated and may have been built for a grotto similar to those built by Salomon de Caus (1576–1626) perhaps with the accompaniment of automated musical instruments.

Leonardo’s Bell Ringing Jacquemart (c. 1510) represents the last and most highly developed of his automata. In what follows, we see how Leonardo’s project to design a hydraulic clock that rang the hours relates to earlier renditions of hydraulic devices, fountains and water clocks.

Leonardo’s life-long career as a roboticist would bridge the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Leonardo’s relationship with his teacher Verrocchio was doubtless the foundation of his work with robots. Perhaps Leonardo even sought to outperform his mentor, striving for even greater technological glory. Not surprisingly, it would take exactly that type of teacher/student relationship in our modern time to reassemble Leonardo’s lost robots. Obviously in love with the technological challenges of mechanisms, Leonardo at an early age shows an astonishing grasp of how to integrate multiple subsystems to accomplish his goal of a self-propelled, compact programmable automaton, perhaps located in the base of a mechanical lion, which would follow a prescribed pattern. In mid-life, he would create an animatronic knight, also for entertainment purposes. Towards the end of his life, he would invent a hydraulic clock in homage to the clepsydras of the ancients but with very modern concepts of components and packaging.