Elektro, the Westinghouse “robot” that made its debut at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, has been getting some press lately. He’s back from the scrapheap of history, thanks to Jack Weeks, son of one of Elektro’s creators, who bought him for $500. Refurbished, Elektro is now drawing crowds at the Mansfield Memorial Museum in Ohio. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against Elektro — in fact, I think he’s pretty freakin’ cool. He could smoke cigarettes. Gotta love robots that smoke! But where I do take umbrage is the continued assertion that Elektro was a “true” robot, and the first robot in the US. Elektro was certainly an impressive and innovative machine, but he was really little more than an animatronic puppet. He had an operator off-stage that controlled him.
Now, as I described in my robot book, things can quickly get ugly and argumentative when you’re trying to define what constitutes a “true” robot, but I would assume that anyone, given the choice between an autonomous, self-charging machine and a remote-controlled one with no brains to speak of, would say that the device with autonomy was the real robot. In which case, THIS is one of the first real robots. Not made in the US, built in Britain in 1948/49, but by an American, W. Grey Walter. If you want to know more about Elektro, check out these pages, which include some details of the mechanics. More cool pics of Walter’s REAL robots here.