Leonardo's fighting vehicle
precursor to the tank invented by Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci's fighting vehicle, also known as Da Vinci's Tank, is one of the conceptions of the revered Italian polymath and artist Leonardo da Vinci.
Design
From one of Leonardo da Vinci's letters, addressed to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan written around 1482, part of Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus:
I will make protected wagons, reliable and impregnable, which, piercing the enemy's ranks with the fire of their artillery, will destroy him, no matter how great the number of his soldiers. The infantry can follow the tanks without suffering great losses and without encountering any resistance.
Design in depth
The concept was designed while Leonardo da Vinci was under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza in 1487. Sometimes described as a prototype of modern tanks, Leonardo's armoured vehicle represented a conical cover inspired by a turtle's shell. The covering was to be made of wood and reinforced with metal plates. Slanting angles would deflect enemy fire, similar to sloped armour today. The machine would be powered by two large cranks operated internally by four strong men and equipped with an array of light cannons, placed around the perimeter.The gears of the design were located in a reversed order, making the vehicle unworkable. This is thought by some sources to have been a deliberate mistake by Leonardo as a form of security, in case his design was stolen and used irresponsibly as seen in his other designs where he also used mirror writing, it is almost impossible to fix this problem successfully without taking away power from its forward movement and strength. However in the documentary "Da Vinci's Machines" (2009), a team of engineers and craftsmen undertook the challenge of reconstructing Leonardo's design for an armoured vehicle, commonly referred to as his tank.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1124226. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1482, 1487 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leonardo's fighting vehicle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.