History of Robots - 500 To 1500

500 To 1500

The Cosmic Engine, a 10-metre (33 ft) clock tower built by Su Song in Kaifeng, China in 1088, featured mechanical mannequins that chimed the hours, ringing gongs or bells among other devices. Al-Jazari (1136–1206), an Arab Muslim inventor during the Artuqid dynasty, designed and constructed a number of automatic machines, including kitchen appliances, musical automata powered by water, and the first programmable humanoid robot in 1206. Al-Jazari's robot was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. His mechanism had a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns by moving the pegs to different locations.

Interest in automata was either mostly non-existent in medieval Europe, or unrecorded. Oriental automata did, however, find their way into the imaginary worlds of medieval literature. For instance, the Middle Dutch tale Roman van Walewein ("The Romance of Walewein", early 13th century) describes mechanical birds and angels producing sound by means of systems of pipes.

One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot was made by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) in around 1495. Da Vinci's notebooks, rediscovered in the 1950s, contain detailed drawings of a mechanical knight in armour which was able to sit up, wave its arms and move its head and jaw. The design is likely to be based on his anatomical research recorded in the Vitruvian Man but it is not known whether he attempted to build the robot (see: Leonardo's robot).