“When Lionardo was at Milan the King of France came there and desired him to do something curious; accordingly he made a lion whose chest opened after he had walked a few steps, discovering himself to be full of lilies.”

Giorgio Vasari,The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Florence 1550).

Constructing a mechanical lion that could walk, let alone present flowers to the king, can’t have been a simple task back in 1515 – even for a genius like Leonardo da Vinci. How he managed this feat remained a mystery until 2000, when US robotics expert Mark Rosheim came to a surprising conclusion.

Pulling together fragments of notes and drawings, Rosheim worked out that the lion was almost certainly powered by a clockwork cart illustrated in da Vinci’sCodex Atlanticus(see Illustration) Intriguingly, Rosheim suggested that the cart’s steering mechanism was controlled by arms attached to rotating gears. With this design it would have been possible to control the automaton’s movements simply by changing the position of these arms – in other words, Rosheim argues, da Vinci’s lion was not only clockwork, it was also programmable.

This astonishing idea raised some intriguing questions: was da Vinci influenced by an earlier design? And if so, how far back in history can we trace programmable robots?

In search of answers I followed the technology back through medieval Europe to the Islamic world, where I have found evidence of an even earlier programmable automaton, made in Baghdad by the brilliant 13th-century engineerIbn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari. He created a veritable boatload of programmable robot musicians – effectively a…