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."

Comments

Re:That's impressive

[GuyMannDude]

I suppose this is getting a bit nit-picky but your post about how people associate robots with computers instead of mechanics is a bit bizarre since the same thing could be said about computers themselves! Recall that Babbage and Huygens had working mechanical computers long before there was freely-available electricity. I could rewrite your above comment replacing "robots" with "computers" and it would be equally true of the first non-digitial computers:

I'm really impressed that they had something like that over 60 years ago. ...that's before electricity! Computers now are inherently thought of as electronic I think... it's interesting to see that there really are mechanical versions of them. (I know there are still mechanical computers, but they're almost always controlled by electricity - this one clearly wasn't).

GMD

also used in bad club music

[Doktor Memory]

(I'm pretty sure that it was this Elektro that Meat Beat Manifesto sampled on the "Original Fire" album.)