Who invented CVT transmission?

The CVT - Continuously Variable Transmission - design, also known as a shiftless transmission, is an ingenious gearbox system often applied in advanced engineering situations such as car gearboxes, gas and oil field drills and various other forms of plant and machinery. In other words, a modern phenomenon.

Many people are surprised to hear where it's design first originated: Leonardo Da Vinci.

They are fundamentally different to regular gears because they are designed around a cone pulley system, making the gearing a smooth transition across all torques rather than the set of fixed ones in traditional designs.

Well-documented

The CVT system is more economical than a traditional gearing system since the torque is always at the optimal level, and not set over/under the ideal value as in fixed gears which waste energy. 

Tech before it's time

There's a class of Mandela Effect which can bee summed up as "suddenly from nowhere",  where events and objects which you'd expect to be much more widely known "appear". Those experiencing the Mandela Effect with those are suggesting this is how time travel would look if it were really happening. Some event, or object, inserted in the past where it wasn't before would appear to jump out instantly. Of course  it's also possible that these were there all along but just didn't get the attention expected.

In fact this isn't the only instance of Da Vinci himself coming up with something ahead of it's time - he's even said to have invented contact lenses too.

Efficient mechanical design was a cornerstone of Da Vinci's whole ethos. Of course he couldn't have envisaged the exact design we see today in modern motor vehicles, but the principle of the CVT was clear to him and, although universally applicable, had to be invented first by someone, somewhere.