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Da Vinci's Walking Mechanical Lion Brought to Life

by Warren Riddle on August 18, 2009 at 07:01 AM


Leonardo Da Vinci is well known for his incredibly intricate and prophetically futuristic designs, including a legendary helicopter and blueprints for a self-propelled cart. It has only taken 500 years for someone to finally reproduce a working model of one of his most mysterious automatons (mechanized robots).

Although specific plans were never found in any of Da Vinci's works, eyewitness accounts from 1515 described a walking mechanical lion that Da Vinci created for the King of France. According to Reuters, using those accounts and Da Vinci's own sketches of mechanisms, Renato Boaretto, a "master maker of automatons," has successfully created a hand-wound robo-lion that walks, wags its tail, and opens its jaws.

While some may celebrate this feat as regaining a lost piece of history, we're not so eager to rejoice. Da Vinci obviously disposed of his original plans on purpose. The man was a genius, so he must have known that at some point the robo-animals would eventually break their shackles of domesticated slavery in order to mangle and eat their human captors. [From: Reuters]

Tags: da vinci, DaVinci, history, robot, top

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