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Elektro, the Oldest U.S. Robot
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you happen to be around Ohio this coming fall, don't miss an exhibit at the Mansfield Memorial Museum featuring the 7-foot-tall Elektro, the oldest robot in the U.S.. "Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940 for several hundred thousand dollars each," according to the article from the Plain Dealer, Cleveland. Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words. It even appeared in a long-time forgotten movie, "Sex Kittens Go to College," also known as "The Beauty and the Robot." Primidi.com has an overview containing other details, references and pictures."
If you happen to be around Ohio this coming fall, don't miss an exhibit at the Mansfield Memorial Museum featuring the 7-foot-tall Elektro, the oldest U.S. robot with its 65 years. "Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940 for several hundred thousand dollars each," according to this article from the Plain Dealer, Cleveland (free reg. is sometimes necessary). Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words.Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World's Fair in 1939. It even appeared in a long-time forgotten movie, "Sex Kittens Go to College," also known as "The Beauty and the Robot." Read more...
Other information about this exhibit is featured on this page at the Mansfield & Richland County Convention & Visitors Bureau website.
"Elektro was the first true robot ever built in the United States," said museum director, Scott Schaut. "Built in total secrecy by Westinghouse, Elektro was promoted as the ultimate appliance. In fact, it was thought that Elektro would one day be able to cook, do laundry and entertain the children."
But let's return to the Plain Dealer article.
[After being restored for $500 by Jack Weeks, whose father, John, helped create the robot in Mansfield for Westinghouse,] Elektro is back home -- repaired, polished and drawing crowds to the Mansfield Memorial Museum. Recently, he was taken off display for repairs, but he will return in September.
"We had more than 4,000 people come to the museum to see Elektro since September," said Schaut. "It was wildly popular, and a good way to get people to visit the museum."
Jack Weeks with the restored Elektro Here Jack Weeks, 70-year old, stands close to the 7-foot, 65 year-old Elektro (Credit: Mansfield Memorial Museum).
Elektro, like the other robots built by Westinghouse seventy years ago, was pretty expensive, but also brought back money.
Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940. The company predicted the robots -- built for an estimated cost of several hundred thousand dollars each -- would be the ultimate household appliances, handling daily drudge work such as washing dishes and cutting the grass.
[But] "they made millions off him," Schaut said. "People came in from all over the world to see him at the New York World's Fair. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s, Elektro traveled around the country from appliance store to store. People flocked to see him. It was a hugely successful promotion."
Elektro at the New York World's Fair in 1939 If you want to know more about Elektro, David H. Szondy has assembled photos and drawings from the past on this page. This one shows Elektro at the New York World's Fair in 1939 (Credit: David H. Szondy).
Later, Elektro went to Hollywood.
Elektro did what many Californians do -- he wound up in the movies. He played Thinko, a giant robot that handicapped horses, in the 1960 film "Sex Kittens Go to College (1960)," also known as "The Beauty and the Robot," with Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld.
Now that you're a fan of Elektro, you might want to buy an image. From this page, you can buy one from Corbis. But be sure to have your credit card with you. A small version (7.29 x 9.11 cm) costs $90 while a larger one (17.09 x 21.36 cm) goes for $200! Personally, I think these prices are outrageous.
Sources: Michael Sangiacomo, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, February 9, 2005; and various websites
Here's a picture:h tm
http://www.davidszondy.com/future/robot/elektro1.
Omar
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/ . It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/ ) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per m
Elektro also had a dog named Sparky, and they were introduced at the 1929 World's Fair. Here's another link for your viewing pleasure.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Eh, actually we would be behind a couple decades without WWII. Research into physics and chemistry really accelerated during the war, perhaps enough that without it, even the transistor would be a somewhat more recent invention.
Gone!
I'm sure by the time I finish writing this there will be have a dozen comments about whether or not Roland Pickapeckofpickledpeppers is or is not a scummy plagiarist with a secret deal with the OSDN (Overlords of Slashdot Donations Network, that is), delivering vast quantities of cocaine in exchange for his stories automatically appearing on the slashdot front page.
;-).
To save everyone else the trouble of repeating the same arguments over and over, why don't you just read the main crux of the complaint and an official response. Then kindly move along unless you have something new and dramatic to add, in which case you might be able to get in one or two posts before the OSDN thugs and/or hired assassins start knocking on your door
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
"sex kittens go to college" is not porn... really. technically it's labelled as "comedy", although i think most of the laughs were unintentional.
full rundown on this 1960, black-n-white, b-grade, cheesecake movie here.
2 1337 4 u!
According to the Mansfield Memorial Museum website http://www.mansfieldtourism.com/CVB_Site/Pages/ele ctro.htm:
The exhibit will be on display at the Museum from September 7 through November 20, 2004.
The exhibit is over. You can go about your business. Move along.
"Well Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." - Dr. Roger Fleming
There certainly still are world fairs. And this year's in Japan will have lots of robots, too.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
> How come there are no more World's Fairs?
The "World's Fair" name was stuck onto the International Exposition (or just "Expo" as they're usually called), which is held every five years or so, in order to celebrate internationalism, the precursor to today's globalism. The name has since fallen out of favor, as the whole lookie-lookie novelty flavor "it's a small world after all" faddish style of internationalism that was the hallmark of the World's Fairs has since faded. It was never an official name.
They haven't been held in the USA for a while, since they've often been expensive organizational disasters. One could argue though that we have so many conventions that we're having a nonstop expo in our own fashion.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot