Robots Answer All Questions

HOW England’s mechanical men work was recently explained. A youngster wishing to know the location of a restaurant sees one of the mechanical men on a street corner. Approaching him, he presses a button on his tummy. Almost instantly lights stare from under the steel man’s heavy eyebrows and a deep voice booms out, “What do you want to know?”

The youth startled, stutters, “Ppplease, where can I find a restaurant?”

“Three blocks and turn to your right,” the answer comes.

Bewildered, the boy follows directions and, sure enough, walks straight into a restaurant.

What has happened is this: When the youth pushed the button on the man’s stomach a light showed in front of a man in a control room some distance away. He immediately “plugged in” on the steel man from which the signal came. Conversation was possible by a microphone connection.

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Mechanical Monsters that Live and Breathe

by BENNETT LINCOLN

When the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals steps in to prevent the mistreatment of a papier mache elephant, the modeler of that elephant can consider himself an artist with a capital A. This article tells you of the world’s most amazing studio, in which lifelike creatures, from spiders to prehistoric monsters which walk, eat, and breathe, are manufactured by skilled artists and mechanics.

IN THE life of a really great artist the crowning moment comes when his own skillful reproduction is actually believed by the onlooker to be the original living model.

Such was the case recently at the premiere of the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City when one of the best known theatre critics in America thought that mechanical elephants which appeared on the stage in one scene were the genuine goods from the jungle. Each elephant supported a chorus girl on his trunk.

As a matter of fact these very lifelike pachyderms were produced in the studios of Messmore & Damon, the most famous makers of mechanical monsters in the world. Their factory in the Old Chelsea District of Manhattan is, figuratively speaking, the wildest and most unreclaimed bit of land in the country. It abounds with all species of ferocious beasts.

But they are harmless, of course. Their ferocity is limited by mechanical prudence. Each year they bring hundreds of thousands of dollars to their owners, perhaps more than real circuses.

Although most of the products of Mess-more & Damon find their way to department stores as spectacular window displays, requests pour in for exhibits for parades, freak museums, the Broadway stage, lectures and countless commercial enterprises.

A short time ago a customer placed his own peculiar problem before Joseph Damon, one of the partners. The wine brick business had just taken New York by storm and this inquirer owned a chain of establishments selling these concentrations. He wanted a display in the window which would capture the attention of the passing throngs.

Mechanized Advertising Models The wine brick man thought he wanted the figure of a man pouring himself a glass of the liquid, lifting it to his lips, and then licking his cheeks with satisfaction.

Mr. Damon advised against that. It wouldn’t look just right in prohibition times.

“What you want,” explained Mr. Damon, as he sketched his idea for the man on paper, “is a seal balancing one of your bricks on the tip of his beak. The seal will waddle his body and twirl the brick around. They’ll be watching for the seal to drop the brick. That’ll get ‘em.”

The seal idea clicked. Reduced to a simple formula, the working secret of the Messmore & Damon models may be found in the use of clever motors and reduction gears, making possible slow and accurate motion. These go to form the “insides” of the monsters. Sometimes they are hidden in a box on which the figure is super-imposed.

Modeled by Artists Papier mache is used to construct the form of the beast or whatever model is desired. .First the animals are modeled in clay by artists, in which branch Mr. Damon is considered pre-eminent, and then they are cast in plaster. The finished figure is ultimately built up by stuffing the mould with layer upon layer of the wet paper, the substance known as papier mache.

Throughout the entire process there is strict co-ordination between artists and mechanics. There must be perfect synchronization in order to attain success.

George H. Messmore, who is the mechanical genius of the Messmore & Damon combination, cited their reproduction of the dinosaur, a creature which roamed the face of the earth some 50,000,000 years ago, as an example of the harmony which must be struck between artist and mechanic.

“The body of this restored mammal was made of rattan and was put together with springs so as to be flexible. We obtained our data for this restoration from the American Museum of Natural History, which was very much interested in our work.

“Inside the body there was a table which carried motors and speed reducers which operated the various parts. The legs of the table passed through the legs of the ‘dino.’ The head and neck were controlled by a heavy steel tubing working through a series of flexible shafts.

Switchboard Controls Motion “Every motion was controlled from one switchboard. If desired, the motions could have been reversed. A man concealed within a thatched hut ran the switchboard, controlling the dinosaur’s movements.- “The artist had to maintain a fidelity for his original specimen in designing the form of the dinosaur and it was the mechanic’s job to see to it that the pulleys and weights brought about various contortions which were true to type and not ridiculous and unreal.

“This model was so constructed that the eyes, head, neck, hips, belly, sides and tail moved with weird realism. This fellow is often taken on the road for department store attractions or even for some carnival, and a lecturer goes along.

Dinosaur Brings Down House “The lecturer brings the house down because of the antics he is able to command the dinosaur to perform. It will take a handkerchief from the man’s hand and place it in his pocket. It will roll its eyes and make all kinds of sounds and movements with its mouth, while its body is heaving as if in the act of breathing. Sometimes it suddenly snaps its tail and lashes those nearby, causing quite a hilari- ous furore as the spectators are frightened.

“The lecturer pretends not to notice these surprise acts. They are executed by the man secreted in the hut at the switchboard.

“The building of the dinosaur was a big undertaking. It was ten feet high and fifty feet long. The covering was made of heavy rubberized quilting. The head and feet were made of specially prepared papier mache. It weighed over 4,000 pounds and cost $35,000 to build.

Monster Goes on Tour “This winter this synthetic dinosaur is going to start out on a theatrical tour, doing forty weeks on the Fanchon-Marco circuit. It will actually walk down stage, pick up a beautiful girl between its jaws, lift her to a height of fifteen feet, let her down and bow gracefully to the audience.

“In addition to the elephants which we now have playing in the Follies, we have just completed two more which are going to appear in the new Schwab & Mandel musical comedy on Broadway. Each one of these elephants, as well as being worked by motors and gears, must be supplemented by a man who is secreted in each one and who operates various strings, causing them to sway and dance in unison, as well as wag their ears to the time of the music.

A $30,000 Model “While that dinosaur took eighteen months to complete, we had another longtime job on our hands when we set about constructing a lifelike mammoth. It took a year and $30,000 to make this.

“Its skin was made of the hide of over 400 Mongolian goats. The sixteen electric motors which were inside it, made it breathe, roll its eyes, wiggle the ears, move its trunk and toss its head. The dinosaur and the mammoth, plus a model caveman thrown in for atmosphere, make quite an exhibition.

“A short time ago we installed these models in a Newark department store and 400,000 people visited that establishment during the two weeks the animals were there. This one set brings close to $150, 000 a year in rental from department stores or others desiring it.

Models Made for Talkies “As is apparent, we turn out everything from a spider to an elephant in the way of realistic models. Even the talkies come to us for their make-believe animals and other exhibits. We have just finished a huge saxophone for Warner Brothers-Vita-phone. Musicians will emerge from various valves and keys of this gigantic instrument. It. is 21 feet high.”

One of the biggest jobs Messmore & Damon have ever tackled was the exhibition of models depicting the history of American transportation. There were ten miniature exhibits which traced the history of transportation from the days of the Indian drag up to the day of the first airplane.

The figures were one-third life-size scale, the ground and water effects were of specially – prepared cloth, and the coaches, steamboats, locomotives, automobiles and airplanes were perfect working models. About 200 artists and mechanics were employed 011 this undertaking which required $150,000 to complete.

“One of our monster displays got us into considerable difficulty not so long ago, just because someone misunderstood,” Mr. Damon told me.

“The Chrysler Motor Company commissioned us to build one of our papier mache elephants for them. They •wanted to use it in connection with an advertising campaign. This elephant could do everything but eat peanuts.

“He was installed on top of an automobile and was taken around the city. Finally at one stop, agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals went up to the driver of the car and told him that several women had complained about the ill treatment and danger to which the elephant was exposed.

S.P.C.A. Makes a Call “No sooner had we explained our way out of that situation than the same society was called in when three of our mechanical giraffes had been left lying out in the snow.”

An odd coincidence brought Mr. Mess-more and Mr. Damon together. They first met at the time of the Hudson-Fulton Ex- hibition in New York in 1909, since which time they have been in business together.

Mr. Messmore had been doing sundry jobs about the theatre and finally rising to head man of the backstage mechanics at the Metropolitan Opera House. Mr. Damon divided his time between days at a butcher shop and nights at an art school. Mr. Damon finally became one of the staff in charge of the Hudson-Fulton pageant. They decided to pool their talents.

Next year they are planning to enter a number of floats at the celebration of the Washington Bicentennial. Their exhibits will portray various signal events in the life of the first President.

ROBOT mower cuts grass within signal-wire perimeter around lawn. It automatically turns around when it hits wire. Quiet, virtually maintenance-free, battery-powered unit random cuts up to 7,000 sq. ft. on one charge; $795.

MowBot. Inc., North Tonawanda. N. Y. 14120

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Robbie and Gronk Mobile Robots

By Keith Paul

What good is it, or what can it do? These were the most frequently asked questions while ‘Robbie’ the robot was on display at Bell Canada’s recent ‘open house’ held to celebrate the opening of their new 24-story Regional Headquarters building in Toronto. ‘Robbit,’ a tall conical shaped robot (Photo 1), and ‘Gronk,’ the shorter cylindrical machine (Photo 2), are the two robots which John Hughes and myself built over the past year.

I first became interested in robots while attending a communications trade show in Kansas City, Missouri, last year. I was not so much taken in by the technology required to make it work at the time, as I am exposed to that daily in my work, as I was the effect it had on the people that were confronted with a robot for the first time.

How does one feel talking to a piece of tin and electronic gadgetry resembling something less than a mechanical man, say, a shop type vacuum cleaner? Well, it soon became apparent to me that there are as many types of reactions as there are people.

However, three main reaction categories can be derived by observation. The first and most prevalent is surprise followed by bewilderment and in some cases fear.

Watching and noting these reactions with Robbie the robot, who weighed some 50 pounds and stood over 5 feet tall, caused the uneasy feeling that if it dropped a wheel off the edge of a walkway, it would topple over, crushing a small dog, child or Volkswagen. This led to the development of Gronk, the second robot, smaller and less threatening. Robbie, the first attempt at building a robot, was constructed of 1/32″ x 5′ sheet metal, conical shaped to form the outer skin. This mounted on a 1/2″ plywood base 26″ in diameter (this dimension happened to be that of my son’s bicycle wheel used to draw the circular base). Two used car windshield wiper motors mounted vertically were its basic ingredient. These motors were energized by two 6-volt motorcycle batteries (6N2-2A) connected in series to give the 12 volts required to run them at full speed.

Two speeds were provided by using the full 12 volts or tapping into the 6 volt connection, approximately 60/30 rpm respectively. Fast or slow speed was selected by a manual switch placed just below the back of his head at shoulder level, along with the power on/off switches.

The forward, right and left turn functions were accomplished by simply providing power to both, left or right wheels respectively. This was all under remote control using a hand-held RS, FM-91 Wireless Microphone and an RS AM/FM Pocket Portable Radio 12-609 mounted in the head of the robot. The head is a sphere, originally used as a speaker enclosure.

With the speaker removed and the receiver taking its place, along with the antenna sticking out the top of it, I now had remote controlled voice and functions.

The functions were operated by transmitting sub-audible tones 25 and 35 Hz which were push button energized and injected into the FM transmitter’s amplifier stage (Figure 1). At the receive end the sub-audible tones were picked off the receiver speaker (using the earphone jack, modified) and cabled to the base where they were amplified and used to lock two phase lock loops (567′s). If and when they lock, it causes an output which controls a transistor driver which in turn operates two RS 12V DC DPDT relays. The 6 or 12 volts derived from the motorcycle batteries were passed over the form ‘c’ contacts fo the relays to the windings of the motors (Figure 2).

By pushing the buttons on the control box which injected the sub-audibles into the FM transmitter and/or speaking into the associated microphone you could control the forward direction of the robot and provide a voice.

Clearance lights, inserted in to the 2″ exhaust flex tubing used for arms, which were subsequently bound with plastic electrical tape, were lighted over contacts of the right/left relays when the motors were energized. This provided some measure of awareness.

It was soon found that the FM transistor and receiver would fade and/or drift off frequency just enough to give unreliable operation. Also, the phase lock loops wouldn’t, at times most of the electronic buffs know. Worse than that, it is characteristic for their output to become pseudo analog. This means that the output fluctuates rapidly between zero and one, leaving you in the “twilight zone.” When this happens Robbie’s behavior becomes erratic to say the least, and just maybe you have created a monster.

However, this first attempt was worthwhile as I soon found out what approach not to take. I should add, however, that for some fun with a semi-autonomous, (not designed that way), robot at a price almost anyone can afford, this approach has merit.

My second attempt at being creative resulted in a robot known as Gronk. Physically short and squatty, about 40″ high and 22″ in diameter, is more robotish in the popular sense.

Photo 2 is a general view of this robot as it appears. Practically speaking it resembles a large domed can of spray deodorant. Actually the outer skin is a 40 gallon (Imperial) hot water tank cover chopped down to 26″. The machine is cylindrical, and weighs 50-60 pounds. The metal skin is covered with felt material, which gives it a warmer appearance plus color. This skin is removable for gaining access to the drive motors and electronic controls. Limited access to these components is also available through a covered port at the back.

Modular construction is used where possible, i.e. motor mounts, plug-in relays and circuit cards, etc. (Photo 3). The entire unit is powered by a number of 6 volt motorcycle batteries connected in series to provide up to 24 volts DC.

The robot’s locomotion comes from two drive wheels (Photo 4). An idler is provided as a third wheel for balance. Direction is given by stopping one wheel and driving the other. The wheels are constructed of solid rubber 41/2″ in diameter and 1Vz” wide with a center steel core that has been forced onto a steel shaft. The shaft is geared and mounted between two self aligning pillow blocks. If both wheels are moved in the same direction, the robot travels forwards or backwards in a straight line. If the wheels are moved in opposite directions, the robot executes a near perfect rotation about its vertical axis.

The precision of movement is limited principally by non-planer floors, wheel slippage, unequal wheel diameters, and the like.

The drive motors are Delco Appliance Motors #5070200, 12 volt DC reversable clutch driven geared units with electro-mechanical braking. I found these at an aircraft surplus parts store in Toronto. By the way these surplus stores, rather than the usual electronic surplus stores, have a better selection of good quality components at an almost affordable price. These motors were only eight dollars a piece; the wiper motors previously used were ten dollars each. I found matching shaft gears that gave me a wheel rotation of approximately 60 rpm. These were then assembled on a steel plate 1/4″ x 15″ x 13″ to form the arrangement as shown. Incidentally, don’t use steel. Use aluminum and bolt things together if you don’t have access to a heliarc welder. This cuts the weight down significantly (5-10 lbs.).

These motors are driven by 12V DC through contacts of RS 12V DC DPDT relays. I used these relays as they are “plug in” and have the contact current carrying capacity and operate voltage values that are required. This time, audible coded voice frequency tones were used at the transmit end, modulating a voltage controlled oscillator which provided a 16 kHz subcarrier center frequency. This subcarrier modulates a 100 mw crystal controlled transceiver which is currently in popular use, (Figure 3).

A transceiver of a similar type is used to receive these coded voice frequency tones, which are put through a high pass filter and limiter. This 16 kHz subcarrier modulated by the coded voice frequency tones is demodulated using a 567 phase lock loop configured as an FM demodulator, leaving the VF tones only. Seven tones matrixed to provide 19 combinations give more than enough discrete outputs to drive the features that I wanted to include. All this is housed on a vertical stand welded to the metal base, (Figure 4).

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Antique Mechanical Computers Part 2: 18th and 19th Century Mechanical Marvels

Dr James M Williams
58 Trumbull St
New Haven CT 06510

In “Part 1: Early Automata,” page 48, July 1978 BYTE, we traced the development of antique mechanical computers up to the middle of the 18th century, and described such devices as Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. Now we continue with a discussion of talking, writing and music playing automata of the 18th and 19th centuries. (The discussion is not meant to be an exhaustive one, of course, since that would be beyond the scope of this series.) Later Automata.

Vaucanson’s creations blazed across the scene in Europe 240 years ago, casting new light into hitherto dark places by showing what the dedicated mechanician could achieve. But, even after Vaucanson, the way was difficult. 38 years passed before a second flute playing machine was seen, a seated pair of rustics built by Duchamps in 1776 and said to be capable of playing 13 tunes. 109 years after Vaucanson made the original mechanical duck, a mechanician named Rechsteiner, who had restored that original duck, produced and displayed a duck of his own. Rechsteiner’s duck was the product of three years of work. It appeared in 1847 and was the last automaton animal of note.

In the last quarter of the 18th century, first a few, then nearly a flood of automata began to appear, as clockmakers began to realize not only the possibilities of their craft but also the splendid prices their premier work might command. The more standard automata such as ornamented clocks, from snuffbox size to prodigies bigger than steamer trunks, with processions of moving allegorical figures, spirals, pin-wheels, and waterfalls, chimes, bells, dulcimers, whistles, organs, and birdcalls, continued to be made and sold. Every titled person had a score of them and men of substance could own several. The clock-maker of ambition knew where his challenge lay. There were mysteries to be created in machinery, and money and fame to be had. Mechanicians began to devote themselves to duplicating the physical action of parts of the human body. They chose part-behavior because of the immense difficulty of fabricating a mechanism that could imitate even one of the coordinated acts humans orchestrate into the continuous chain of actions; namely, behavior.

It is worth noting that in adults the discrete units of purposeful action which seem so integrated and effortless to most of us are anything but smooth and coordinated in early childhood. Most people can recall their clumsiness and exasperation in learning to tie their shoes or button their garments. The most intense concentration and dedicated repetition is required to cause these action patterns to set in our central computing mechanism (see “The Brains of Men and Machines,” parts 1, 2, 3 and 4, February thru April 1978 BYTE), but once the setting (ie: learning) takes place over time, it becomes possible for us to execute one of these unit actions at will, devoid of effort and concentration. (The mechanism and locus of the setting is obscure: so is other memory storage. Lately, the cerebellar complex is viewed as the best candidate for unitary motor actions.) We can tie shoelaces behind our backs, a thing we never practiced or learned. Even extreme situations, like tying shoelaces while wearing mittens or hanging by the knees from a trapeze, do not begin to strain the capacities of our interior computing mechanism. The required actions have been “frozen” into our brains. Not only are they refractory to disarrangement (they endure as long as we live) but they are also flexible enough to permit our adapting them to novel circumstances. We all possess within us many thousands of such unitary chunks of learned behavior, now fully automatized and playable on command.

This is the part-behavior, smooth, continuous and automatic, that was being imitated by mechanicians. It requires substantial storage of program to duplicate. From our vantage point program storage is the most important feature these machines possessed. Consequently, many very beautiful mechanisms (the display pieces of Carl Faberge, jeweler to the Imperial Russian Court; a wide range of novelties such as soothsayers, magicians and other conjurers, acrobats and ropewalkers, agile harlequins and jugglers, automatic confectioners and wine stewards, and a great many more display mechanisms) are not mentioned here because they had little stored programming.

Walking and Running Machines.

Early walking and running automata were represented only by dolls and toys. They were essentially trivial, programmed devices for they always very ingeniously arranged an apparent walking action (only a simple repetitive motion). The walk lacked directionality, nor was there provision for walking on other than smooth surfaces. It would be difficult to design a machine to walk in the same sense that people do: that is, the weight of the trunk is for a moment supported by one leg alone while the other leg is being drawn forward for a next step. Walking is in fact organized falling, with the mobile extremity brought forward just in time to forestall disaster. When you stop to recall that every known mechanical man actually rolls on wheels, and that at least three wheels are always employed to define the plane, you gain a new respect for human locomotion and a valuable perspective on the limitations of mechanisms that undertake to imitate it.

Speaking Machines.

As far as I can discover, no programmable device uttering words, or their approximations, was ever known before the late 19th century (or even in later periods up to the time of Bell Labs’ A/odor of 1939 World’s Fair fame, which required an operator). Still, some remarkable devices appear to have existed. Leaving aside the brazen talking heads that dot Greek and Byzantine mythology (they were without a doubt all hoaxes), we learn that the Abbe’Mical in 1774 was said to have exhibited two talking heads which he later destroyed. In 1779 Kratzenstein won a prize offered by the Russian Imperial Academy of Science for a device that could pronounce distinguishable vowels. This device was made from a set of five specially shaped pipes. Baron Wolfgang Kempelen, creator of the Great Chess Automaton, worked for many years on talking devices, and one was said by Goethe to be “.. .able to say some childish words very nicely.” The machine was a kind of bellows, soundbox, artificial tongue and mouth contrivance that the Baron manipulated under cover of a cloth; it now resides in a museum in Munich. Farber invented a machine which apparently spoke well enough to induce PT Barnum to purchase it for exhibition, in 1873. The device was operated by a keyboard.

It is a very curious thing that investigation of artificial speaking devices was so neglected by gifted mechanicians, for speech is the unique achievement of man. Moreover, the ear is so adaptable and forgiving of faults in the spoken word that virtually any kind of squawk might pass for a sentence. The mechanical problems would have been very great, but not insuperable.

Writing Machines.

Between 1753 and 1760 Friedrich von Knaus of Darmstadt devised and constructed four different machines that wrote block letters or cursive script according to programming using a quill pen and ink with programmed pauses to dip the pen. One machine produced three texts from three pens, while the last machine could inscribe up to 107 letters of preset text from its stored program or write individual letters one at a time from dictation under control of the operator. It may accurately be described as the first typewriter or scriptwriter. The mechanism appears to have been a cluster of shaped cams on which rode an array of cam followers, each one directing movements of the pen to form a letter. Text composition was managed by a drum that bore many rows of holes into which studs could be placed to activate the required cam. Thus text was easily altered by changing the pattern of studs. The tablet, bearing paper, moved one step after inscription of each letter. Knaus described his machines in a 1780 book, Selbstschreibene Maschine. His machine number 4 was shown at the Paris Exposition of 1937. It now resides in the Vienna Technical Museum.

The Automata of Jacquet-Droz and Leschot.

How can one describe machines so marvelously devised and “tutored” (ie: programmed) in their tasks that they rival the actions of human beings proficient in the art the machine imitates? One can compare them to humans and the analogy is intriguing, but humans are born with the necessity to learn many advanced action patterns and the automata were able to perform several advanced action patterns directly after construction. And humans age and die while the machines are two centuries old and act as well as the day they were set in place. They are seemingly flawless, ageless, potent and wise. And if you compare them to spirits you will be very nearly right, for they are shaped to resemble otherworldly creatures: cherubs or angels. If the compactness, beauty and simplicity of their mechanism with its nearly perfect functioning leads you to compare them to fine watches, you will be very nearly right again, for their builders were first of all horologists. They were the family of Jacquet-Droz (two brothers and a son) and Leschot, their master mechanician.

Long involved in making elaborate timepieces in Geneva, Jacquet-Droz the younger may well have been influenced by word of Knaus’ writing automaton. The Writer, Draftsman and Musician he designed and constructed, were placed on display simultaneously in 1774, and they have charmed every person who has seen them. They are on display in the Museum of Automata, in Neuchatel, 30 miles east of Geneva in western Switzerland. Consider the fact: here are devices seen and admired today, as well as by the courts of Louis XV, Louis XVI, George III, Napoleon and even by Franklin and Jefferson.

The Writer writes a preset text of 40 letters and spaces in about the same time and with quite a bit more skill than it might be written by an 8 year old child. The Draftsman draws a series of stored pictures, any one you choose, about as well as a gifted child of 12 years might do, while the Musician plays five melodies on her harmonium, as a musical child of 10 years might do. They have been performing these feats for 204 years.

The Writer.

The Writer is 28 inches (71 cm) tall. Carved of wood and painted, this automaton produces “an unusual impression of life” similar to top quality wax figures. He is clothed in a flowing robe and is seated on a Louis XV stool at a mahogany desk. His right hand, poised an inch above the desk and writing tablet, holds a short tube in which a quill pen is fixed. When the mechanism is activated the Writer raises his hand, swings it laterally, dips his pen into the inkwell fixed to the right margin of the desk, shakes the hand twice to clear the pen of excess ink and pauses. Another touch on the mechanism and he begins to write, forming letters with slow, patient care.

After each letter, the pad of paper moves to the left by an amount sufficient to leave space for the next letter, but more for a wide letter or a capital than for is and Is and fs. He can write 40 different letters on two or three lines, and there is programming for several pen dips. Most remarkable is the provision for the unit to vary the pressure of the pen so that the letters produced are weighted, formed of thick and thin strokes.

Except for the few levers controlling movements of the paper tablet, all of the automaton’s mechanism is contained in the torso, accessible from the back. There are two parts of the mechanism, and they interact with each other. The first is a cluster of letterforming cams on a common shaft, the cam follower of which rides on a carriage that slides on rails so it can cover the length of the cluster to settle on the rim of the desired cam. There are actually three cam followers and three cams provided for each letter. Two govern movements of the right arm and the third regulates pen pressure for varying the stroke width.

The second portion of the mechanism is the text selector, a disk 4 inches (10 cm) in diameter at the bottom of the cam cluster shaft. The rim of the text selector disk is divided into 40 sectors, or an angular wedge of 9° per sector. The sectors are not fixed, but rather slide radially when one of their 40 screws is turned. In this way the radius of the disk can be varied sector by sector, giving the appearance of a snaggle toothed gear. Each sector in turn regulates the position of the cam follower carriage (with its three cam followers) according to where that sector is set. Thus the text selector disk selects which set of three cams will be employed, and the letter those three cams control is the letter the right arm inscribes. Changing the text is as easy as turning 40 screws to just the right position. The zero radius (baseline) position of the text disk appears to control the pen dipping mechanism, so you can set up as many pen dips as you wish at the loss of a letter or space for each one.

Control is handed back and forth between the text selector disk and the letter forming cam cluster. Either one or the other operates at a given moment, but the text disk is stationary almost all the time (moving in jumps) whereas the cam cluster that forms the letters is moving most of the time (halting only to permit the text selector to turn to its next position and choose the next letter). An intriguing point, for 1774, is that the surfaces of greatest wear (the three cam follower bearing points) are apparently jewelled with ruby so that the high pressures (probably a 40:1 lever ratio, or more) will cause minimal wear and distortion of the letter shapes over time. All this machinery is said to be quite sensitive to temperature changes.

A point which is obscure to me is that the letter forming cams are alleged to operate on a polar coordinate system. Suppose the letters are formed on X-V coordinates. Photo 2 is a greatly magnified letter superimposed on a grid of 1 mm lines. Now you can appreciate the delicacy of the mechanism, for it is clear that a deviation of ±0.25 mm at any point will make a very different looking letter. (Incidentally, at a 40:1 lever ratio, a 0.25 mm movement at the pen is equivalent to 0.00625 mm on the cam face.) Clearly, the letters as inscribed on paper are well within this deviation (see photo 1 and figure 2).

Look how the es from several different words are exact duplicates: Probably the deviation is within about a tenth of that figure (ie: ±0.025 mm).

The mechanism is analog, of course, but if it were digitalized, the scale applied (resolution) has got to be less than 0.025 mm per bit, or in a letter of 8 mm height and 4.5 mm width:

8/0.025 = 320 bits for height.
4.5/0.025 = 180 bits width.

A grid of 320 by 180 equals 57,600 points, which would be the upper margin of the error. The limit is plus and minus this, so each letter may be digitalized with 57,600/ (2×2) = 14,400 points. But that is the amount for each letter, and we have 26 of them, which is 14,400 x 26 = 374,400. Adding upper case letters, the proper figure is 14,400 x 52 = 748,800 bits to digitalize the entire alphabet within the limits of error the machine consistently displays. You may wish to adjust the figures slightly because not all letters are the size of the y, and hence do not require as much storage of information (see photo 2). However, many letters fall below the line, and the capitals are larger than all the lower case, so it evens out. We have not taken account of the stroke shaping bits, which might require 4 to 6 more increments of information. Altogether, the machine’s “read only memory” has over three quarters of a million 1 bit bytes stored within it!

The Draftsman was constructed to resemble the Writer, and works in practically the same manner except that the tablet of paper is fixed, and the arm holds a pencil instead of a pen. The device moves under guidance of a cam cluster and draws designs in segments with pauses while the mechanism shifts from one cam pair to the next. During these pauses the Draftsman blows a puff of air from his lips to disperse the graphite debris. I would estimate that there might be 20 or more cam pairs for each of the four designs (there are no depth cams) on a slip of paper about 2 by 3 inches (5 by 7.5 cm). The designs were simplified reproductions of popular etchings of the age: cupids in chariots being hauled by butterflies, etc; and the head of Louis XV. The little Draftsman appears to have elicited a good deal more excitement than the Writer, but he was actually easier to construct, since the builders profited from their earlier experience with the Writer and simplified the mechanism.

Assume that the Draftsman’s paper is 50 by 75 mm, that any point on it could play a part in the design, and that it was necessary to provide a mechanism that could discriminate between lines as close together as 0.5 mm (ie: to a tolerance of ± 0.25 mm). You end up with a grid of 50/0.25 by 75/0.25 = 200 x 300 = 60,000 points that may be encoded. These were parcelled out among 20 “read only memory” cams. The total information contained in the machine would be 60 K bits by 4 designs = 240 K bits. The total information storage was much less because the eye can accept more line deviation in a drawing than in the formation of a letter.

The Musician is the triumph of automata that counterfeit life. She is 42 inches (1.07 m) high, seated at her instrument with a pleasant expression on her face. Her clothing is rich satin brocade in the elaborate style of the period, and her coiffure is impressive. She consecutively plays five pieces on her instrument, a curious device rather like a harmonium but called by some accounts a flute-organ, suggesting tuned pipes instead of metal reeds. The keyboard consists of two arcs of keys, 12 on a side. It is double arc shaped because the musician’s arms pivot at the elbows (concealed by lace sleeves on her gown) enabling her to cover all 12 keys with five fingers. The music, or most of it, was composed by Jacquet-Droz the younger, a musician who studied composition with Marchal.

She actually fingers the keys that produce the music! The mechanism to accomplish this feat consists of a connection for each digit, and some extremely clever devices must be employed to enable the arms to swivel while maintaining continuity for the digit controlling mechanism. I leave you to contemplate the delicacy of the arrangements of mechanism that trigger each finger in the tiny hands, but keep in mind that this machine is a workhorse; this musician has been playing music for 200 years.

Her programmed movements are startlingly lifelike in the accounts. All the jacquet-Droz and Leschot automata turn their heads and move their eyes, but this automaton also raises her head to look at the audience, drops her gaze, takes a deep breath, and starts to play. She turns her head as she plays and, swaying from side to side as artists will do, breathes all the while. At the end of a piece she looks up and seems to smile, then shyly lowers her gaze, drops her head, and curtsies.

Other Musicians.

with Jacquet-Droz (fils) in London, introduced a new and improved version of a lady musician. She played a sort of piano, perhaps actually a harpsichord, and it is known that she had 17 or 18 melodies in her programming. She was lost in 1833 when sent to St Petersburg together with other automata.

The Dulcimer Player of Roentgen and Kintzing first appeared in 1780, and was said by the magician Robert-Houdin (who repaired her in 1866) to have been designed to resemble Marie Antoinette and emulate her skill with the string dulcimer. This figure is famous for her beauty, and much praise has been lavished on her musical skill, for the instrument is clearly a difficult one to play (and is hardly known in this country). The mechanism is a cluster of cams mounted below the figure, concealed by her gown.

J N Maelzel, mechanician to the Austrian court and later the proprietor of the Chess Automaton, personally designed and had built a life-size Automaton Trumpeter, which he exhibited beginning in 1808. It was destroyed in a fire, about 30 years later. At least two other trumpeters have existed. What remarkable mechanism they must have contained, especially in view of In 1784 Maillardet, who was in business the praise their performances evoked. None survives.

Maelzel invented and displayed, beginning in 1804, the Panharmonicon, a compound musical mechanism which produced the sounds of flutes, trumpets, drums, cymbals and triangle, and plucked strings, a menage then called Turkish music and much favored by the public. This machine was followed by his Orchestrion, imitating the sound of the military band (which had become popular during the French Revolution). An improved Panharmonicon, with clarinets, violins, and violas added, was so well received that Maelzel commissioned music from Dussek, Pleyel, Weigl, and even Beethoven, whose “Wellington’s Victory,” opus 91, employing the Automaton Trumpeter as well as the orchestra, had its premiere on December 8 1813, in Vienna. These devices were the first of the programmable multiple instrument machines so popular 75 years later.

A Combination Automaton by Maillardet.

It was known that Maillardet, constant collaborator with the Jacquet-Droz and Leschot organization, had constructed a writing and drawing automaton about 1811, which was exhibited in London in 1815, and was owned by several persons until 1833 when it was sent to St Petersburg where it disappeared.

Long ago a resident of Philadelphia mentioned to a staff member of the Franklin Institute that his family owned an automaton that drew pictures and wrote poems. He supposed it to be Maelzel’s work. When the owner’s house was destroyed by fire, reducing the automaton to a “mass of cams and wheels,” the museum acquired it, but it took immense patience and care on the part of the museum restorer, Charles Roberts, to make the machine completely whole. In the restoration process the sex of the automaton was changed. When the time came to sample the machine’s program, it was found to be Maillardet’s missing automaton (see photo 3 in this article and Charles Penniman’s article, “Philadelphia’s 172 Year Old Android” in this issue, page 90).

The machine is about 30 inches (76 cm) high, and represents a child (originally a little boy, as alluded to in one verse, and in an 1812 encyclopedia article) kneeling before a desk and holding, since restoration, not a brush but a pen. The mechanism is in the base and consists of a common shaft holding about 60 cams, each one 6 inches (15 cm) in diameter. The whole is driven by a pair of powerful spring motors. Three triplets of cams are devoted to each of the seven productions of the automaton, except that the depth cams are minimally employed. The follower arms, one for each dimension of the drawing, are jewelled and move from pair to pair of cams in the course of one machine cycle (one drawing). The automaton executes its seven productions rapidly, completing one in 7 to 8 minutes. This would appear to explain Maillardet’s need to skeletonize the 60 programming cams: they turn rather swiftly (about 3 mm of linear motion per second) and at changeover they must be brought quickly to a halt, then accelerated to working speed again. Storing all information on three pairs of large cams per production would have made grinding the cam faces much easier, and would have minimized the effects of wear compared to a small cam. Shifting to a new program is done by simply sliding the common shaft laterally to set up a new triplet of cams.

Maillardet evidently took it as his task to produce a machine that worked on its productions rapidly and casually, perhaps in the manner of a person inspired. The sketches are marked more by fluency of line than by precision, but they are very sophisticated, as a glance at the ship sketch will show (see page 91). The poetry is interesting and is done more in the manner of a design with scriptwriting than writing in script (see figure 2).

In terms of brute force memory storage, if each of the points 1 mm apart on an 89 by 120 mm paper is to be stored, 10,680 points would be required. But discriminating between points with an error of no more than 1 mm requires ± 0.5 mm precision, resulting in 42,720 points that must be stored on the three triplets of cams. But this is the amount of point storage required for one production. There are seven of them, so the total storage capacity within the machine is 42,720 x 7 = 299,040 points (with ±0.5 mm precision). This figure, the digital equivalent of the analog storage, begins to make the impressive forest of cams seem more useful.

All of the above speaks about the information capacity (in terms of a grid of points) necessary to encode the designs and script that our automata can produce by analog means. The great majority of those digital data would not be employed in a display, just as an automaton will not inscribe marks on, say, more than 2 percent of the area of paper available to it. There is a lot of wasted (unused) space in any character generator. For example, most of the billions of micrograins of silver halide in a sheet of emulsion are not actually developed and play no part in a photographic negative.

The same is true of standard character generator read only memories where the 5 by 7 matrix with its 35 points is the absolute minimum matrix you can employ and still produce recognizable, if not particularly legible, alphanumerics. Even so, 50 percent of these bare minimum 35 points are not utilized for any given character, hence there is 50 percent waste. Premium character generator read only memories are set up to use a great many more points, and their displays are still manifestly coarse in structure (“crude” would not be too strong a word, when you know there is something much better).

Here we are simply making visible the difference between analog and digital modes of storing information. The analog mode is obviously more economical, for there are nowhere near 750,000 jiggles in 20 cams.

Next month, we’ll conclude with a final example in this series about antique automata, the chess playing robot of Torres (circa 1911) and some philosophical comments on automata.”

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Antique Mechanical Computers – Part 1: Early Automata

Dr James M Williams
58 Trumbull St
New Haven CT 06510

My purpose in writing these articles is to remind computer enthusiasts that there is a high technology in every age, not just our own. Described herein are some of the stellar accomplishments of earlier times. The technology of electronics is merely the latest link in a continuous chain of technological developments spanning 20,000 years. Before that, there was a mechanical technology.

Part 1 of this three part series describes some highlights in the development of automata up to the 18th century. Part 2 continues with 18th and 19th century developments, and part 3 concludes with a description of Torres’ 1911 chess automaton.

I am not going to speak here of those incandescent moments long ago when the truly great and critical achievements of mechanics were discovered: that day when an ancient man hooked a stick under one large stone and over another to invent the lever. Nor will I consider the wheel, which, however it came about, multiplied mechanical possibilities so manyfold (pulley, cam, gear, crank, escapement) that as the knowledge spread humanity was irrevocably changed. We simply do not know the story of mechanical knowledge and its spread, so we must spin scenarios instead of histories. We will also have to concentrate on highlights, since an exhaustive treatment of mechanical computers would fill many books.

We do know most of the latest chapter, however. It has taken place in the past 350 years, beginning in Renaissance times, flourishing in the Industrial Revolution, and finally levelling off in the early years of this century. The mechanisms that are now commonplace were being born back then, and what exciting times they must have been. Glance through a compilation of mechanisms and note the dates of first appearances in machinery. You will be surprised to see how many basic movements date from two centuries ago. And with study and application, a man could learn them, make them his own, and employ them in mechanisms of his own. Consider the thrill of the obscure local blacksmith in, say, Saxony 400 years ago who copied in wood the mechanism of the town clock’s striking-jack — the clock, a wonder that was the envy of other towns, imported at great expense from Italy — and discovered for himself the means of transforming rotary motion into intermittent linear motion, via a cam. (Medieval cathedral clocks generally had a life-size figure, man, angel, or devil, which carried a mace to strike hours on a bell: the “striking-Jacques” or “striking-jack.”) Imagine the challenge and excitement in realizing that one could construct a clock that would strike noon fairly consistently when the shadow of the church steeple touches a particular joint of flagstone in the village square. Could one compress this wonderous mechanism into a container small enough to carry, and be able to see the time whenever he wished? Could one construct a clock for the pocket?

The first ones showed up around 1650, bulky as an ostrich egg and not much better at keeping reliable time. A little over two centuries ago a carpenter from Yorkshire, England, James Harrison, who had taught himself mechanics over a period of 30 years, constructed his fourth highly accurate watch (chronometer) and won a prize of £20,000 from the British government in 1760. Determined to make the British Navy the master of the seas, the Admiralty offered a prize for a watch that would permit a ship to calculate its longitude with an accuracy of 60 nautical miles after being at sea for six weeks. (Latitude is relatively easy to calculate by accurately measuring the elevation above the horizon of any celestial body. Longitude is more difficult, and requires knowing the elevation at a time known relative to a fixed reference, the zero meridian at Greenwich, England.) Mechanicians (an excellent name for the practitioners of this craft) chose to work in the field for much the same reasons we all choose a field today: because it was an absorbing and genteel means of earning a living, because it offered accomplishments one could show with pride, and because it was the area for future expansion, the growing edge of the technology. Look at the legacy of machines they have left us: the Linotype, the typewriter and its relatives, the reproducing piano (and its less intelligent cousin, the player piano), clocks and watches of every description. They are all fine mechanisms, but most of them were perfected and essentially attained their present configuration 80 years ago and more. Electronic devices have displaced most of them.

The flowering of mechanical technology had other branches that have now died out, though, leaving only accounts in books and a few decaying museum specimens of machinery which once stirred general admiration and brought fame to their creators: the Orrery, a clockwork model of the solar system, complete with moons, that once stood proudly in the exhibition room of every significant university; the dazzling variety of music boxes which once were found in every parlor; and so on. And who nowadays recalls the bird organ (see photo 1 and figure 1)?

The bird organ was a mechanical device that produced a very close simulation of a bird’s song; 200 years ago it was a very expensive and much cherished ornament in the parlor of every gentle home. I have seen electronic versions of circuits for such a device and have built one, but together with its transformer and loudspeaker it occupies most of the space in a small bird-house. A commercial version I purchased is slightly smaller, housed in a 3 inch plastic sphere. Around the year 1800 there was a bird organ made for sale to replace the head of a gentleman’s walking stick. A hinged lid sprang open by a concealed catch, and out popped a minute feather covered bird model that opened its beak, spread its wings and sang. The entire device, except for its winding key, was housed in a gold ornamented cylinder 154 by 2 inches (3.8 by 5 cm) long. How’s that for miniaturization? And I’ll wager it made a better song than my blocking oscillator version.

There were bird organs, or accounts of them, in antiquity. The Greeks used steam or air to drive whistles mounted in bird figures; the Arabs and Persians supposedly did the same. The mechanism was sometimes a cluster of tuned whistles like a bank of miniature organ pipes, and this arrangement is found in a clock from 1750, but the modern bird organ dates from about 1770 and was likely devised as a means of teaching domesticated songbirds to sing. Soon miniaturized, it was incorporated into decorative objets d’art of all sorts: snuff boxes, perfume flasks, table centerpieces (these often had small fountains of water and other distractions built in), clocks, even watches (but these were very rare), and free standing forms. One delightful version of the latter, perhaps 9 inches (23 cm) high, depicts a lady seated at her desk and a bird on a perch pole nearby. Her hand is on a (mock) bird organ, which she cranks while her pet listens attentively. The bird then tries to copy the song, but makes errors, which she corrects by playing the lesson again so that the bird “learns” and repeats it accurately, with much enthusiastic flapping of wings, pivoting on the perch, etc.

Large or small, the mechanism of bird organs was always the same (see figure 1): a main spring drove a gear train which operated a bellows to compress air in a wind box, and another gear train drove an intricately cut cam which, via a piston, varied the pitch of a whistle connected to the air supply. A similar cam operated a valve to control the volume of the whistle tone. More gears drove cams that controlled the beak, wings, and pivoting actions via push wires ascending the perch pole and the bird’s hollow legs. Songs of eight or nine species are to be found among bird organ mechanisms (some elaborate devices had double or triple songs), and the nightingale was most popular. Remember the fairy tale about the mechanical nightingale by brothers Grimm, about 1855? It lived in a jewelled tree, and some devices were made in this form, but the objet d’art was perhaps most popular, being finished in enamel and gold and frequently decorated with precious stones. While bird organs were essentially one of a kind machines, there was a sort of production line for them maintained by the most famous makers, and many thousands of them exist in museums. A great many were exported from France and Switzerland to the Orient. They are still made, and, while expensive, they are no longer the luxury of rich men. [A German bird organ about the size of a pocket calculator is currently available for under $400 ... CM] In computer terms, the complete mechanism might be described as a spring driven power train controlled by a mechanical read only memory whose values are stored as a distance of the edge of the cam from the cam’s center of rotation. In 45 seconds of singing, there might be a fair number of places where the notes sound, perhaps, six to eight per second (during a trill).

Referring to figure 1, if we have two cams which rotate in 45 seconds, and we allow a time division of ten samples per second, and if we allow eight bits of precision per sample, we would require 900 bytes of read only memory to simulate the control functions of these cams.

A longer song, as in the tutorial automaton described above, might require three times as many bytes together with a smaller number to control bird and figure motion. This gives a total of 3 K bytes of mechanical read only memory divided unequally among several cams (something approaching the storage capacity of contemporary read only memory parts).

A better way to look at this sort of mechanism might be as a computer with analog storage (varying cam curves) and analog output (varying positions of the volume valve and pitch piston). Information is stored in the intricate curves of the cams. The information is fixed there for all time, or until wear or rust alter it, and may be recovered whenever it is needed by rotating the cam while the cam-follower rides on its periphery. It is in every way an “analog” of the desired sound, but it is not a recording, because it has been distorted in storage to suit the particular readout mechanism being employed (the cam-follower). (I have described the stored information as digital in order to facilitate the comparison; this has validity because of the relatively small number of analog positions and their re-solvability into bytes of restricted number.) Even in the 1770 to 1850 era the cam was not a new invention, but this application was novel. It was a benchmark in the field of mechanics. Storage of information had now become a tool of the mechanician, where formerly mere repetitive movement, the regular back and forth movement of a clock’s mechanism, was known to be available.

With the possibility of storing information comes the possibility of crafting complex and seemingly nonrepetitive movement. If it is the desire of the builder of the mechanism, these movements may be arranged to mimic the movements of living organisms. This is the basis of more complex mechanical toys like the rabbit that walks about beating on a drum. (Incidentally, in 1880 a minute gold rabbit, perhaps an inch high, who also played his drum, was sold as a brooch. Not to mention a 3 inch gold caterpillar that sedately crawled its path, circa 1850.) However engaging, these were fundamentally simple and regular movements that did not tax the designer. Mechanicians have constructed far more complex machines designed to duplicate the most intricate and coordinated movements performed by living creatures and to produce an effect of illusory life for the few minutes the mechanism operates. Why would clever, dedicated people do such a thing? Why build an automaton?

Machines That Imitate Life: a Rationale Until modern times there was a pervasive and unchallengeable view that the bodies of human beings were not fit subjects for investigation. Death was the penalty for human dissection during the middle ages, except for rare occasions when the Church sponsored demonstrations of the corpses of criminals. Clearly, anything so sternly forbidden must have been well worth investigating; could it have been that the secret of life lay concealed in the structure of the body? There were some who took the risk, and they always found that animal and human structure were very similar. Since, in the influential and respected view of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), animals were machines that differed from humans chiefly in their lack of divine inspiration, it is easy to see the framework for a “mechanistic” view of living organisms. The notion held much appeal. It explained in terms that were comprehensible to the average educated man how living creatures were constructed by substituting mechanism for mystery.

Popular expositions of science from the 1890s right up to the 1940s typically depicted drawings of a person cut away to reveal bellows and pump rooms in the chest, the chemical factory in the abdomen, the telephone switchboard in the skull, the pistons and gears in the limbs, and so on.

I suggest that this conception of organisms as chains of mechanisms, and the corollary, of a god as the divine watchmaker who constructed and set them in motion, was perhaps the most influential factor leading to the construction of machines designed to imitate life. Note the variety of literature in which the attempt to create life is central to the theme: from ballads and fairy tales dating back to the beginning of language to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); from Offenbach’s opera with the clockwork ballerina, Tales of Hoffman (1881), through countless science fiction works, to tales such as Shaw’s Pygmalion. And of course there is recombinant DNA research, the leading edge of biochemical investigation at this moment where the purpose is, manifestly, to explore the mechanisms of life in living cells. The impulse is still there in us although the metaphor is different in different ages, and the mechanisms employed are dependent on available technology.

Astonishing Automata About 1709, in Grenoble, the Edison of automata, Jacques de Vaucanson, was born. Little is known of his early life, except that he was something of a rake and a seminary dropout who disrupted affairs at the monastery by making wood and paper wings that flew about. But much is remembered of his automata, which, though they no longer exist, were the marvel of their age, the object of admiration by all gentlemen who saw them, and the envy of mechanicians ever since.

Vaucanson was not a showman, but a philosopher and inventor. He often spoke of “moving anatomy,” his expression for the concept that life, especially life in lower animals, was in fact a series of undirected movements (what we would today call “reflex movements”), and that by duplicating the movements and actions of a live creature, one might succeed in duplicating the life of the creature. While such a notion seems absurd to us (it is, according to current understandings of the formation of ideas, magical, and therefore primitive) there is precedent for it from a character no less important than St Thomas Aquinas. Vaucanson had a splendid opportunity to come across St Thomas’s writings, since he lived in a monastery for perhaps 15 years. Books were expensive treasures in 1709, and monasteries were the main places where collections existed. St Thomas’s works would probably have been among them. In the Summa Theotogica (Q13; Art 2; Reply obj 3; Part II) there is a passage: “Animals show orderly behavior and are machines, as distinct from man who has been endowed with a rational soul and therefore acts by reason.”

If animals are orderly machines, it might be possible to make a machine that looks and behaves like an animal. If one took special pains to reproduce vital details like respiration, digestion and excretion, etc (so runs the argument), one would then have created the next best thing to a real living animal.

Vaucanson arrived in Paris in 1735 at the age of 26 to pursue his moving anatomy con- cepts. He promptly ran out of money. There is documentation to show he had the idea “. .. of getting assistance by producing some machines that could excite public curiosity .. .” as a means of raising funds. He excited plenty of public curiosity, for in 1738 he simultaneously displayed three automata (see figure 2a). An automaton duck “. . . made of gilded copper who drinks, eats, quacks, splashes about on the water, and digests his food like a living duck” was one, and a pair of automata musicians who played flute and drums were the others.

The machines were life-size and were mounted on cubical pedestals about three feet on a side, which contained the bulky mechanism. They were unique and original, and they created a public sensation for 50 years. To me, the flute player seems the most remarkable mechanism of the three. De Juvigny, a friend of Vaucanson’s, wrote in 1777, “At first many people would not believe that the sounds were produced by the flute the automaton was holding. These people believed that the sounds must come from a bird organ or German organ enclosed in the body of the figure. The most incredulous, however, were soon convinced that the automaton was in fact blowing the flute, that the breath coming from his lips made it play and that the movement of his fingers determined the different notes. . . The spectators were permitted to see even the innermost springs and to follow their movements.” Figure 2b shows the mechanism in outline form. All that needs mention is the weight motor (not shown), and the fact that different weights were added to each bellows in the set of three to provide different pressures of air. High, medium and low pressures provided the designer with the possibility of playing notes loudly or softly in the lowest register, or of shifting the flute to a higher register by employing greater pressures. The distributor valve selected the correct pressure for a given note.

The illustration merely hints at the head mechanism, which must have been extremely complex. This description of flute playing is from the Encyclopedia Brittanica: “The flute is held sideways to the right of the player, who forms his lips to make an aperture and directs his breath stream across the mouth hole and onto its further edge, where it breaks up into eddies that alternate regularly above and below this edge and so excite the air column of the flute into vibration. Stability of the notes in the various registers and at different loudnesses is achieved by control of lip aperture, angle of breath impact, and breath force. The compass is three octaves. …” Vaucanson’s complications came from his decision to use the true flute, blown from the side, and not a recorder, which is an air pipe instrument blown from one end like a pennywhistle or organ pipe. In both instruments, air column length is varied by closing the appropriate holes in the body. To some degree Vaucanson simplified his task by employing seven active fingers (instead of eight, the modern standard: or maybe his particular flute had only seven fingerholes), but he took on and overcame the challenge of providing means to produce the proper size of lip aperture and the proper angle of breath stream to mouth hole. It seems quite likely that Vaucanson used actual rubber, first seen in France in 1736, in the lip mechanism, for there is evidence (in another automaton) that he knew how to fabricate rubber.

Now, I can imagine a mechanism that would dilate and contract the aperture in a set of rubber lips, and vary somewhat the angle of a stream of air blown through the hole, but I have the considerable advantage of being able to draw on two centuries’ accu- mulation of mechanical knowledge. Vaucanson was starting from scratch, building a mechanism never before seen, to produce a motion never before defined, to perform a task never before attempted. That he succeeded so well is astonishing; that he did it within 36 months is staggering. And remember, he employed mainly hand tools. There was no local machine shop he could call on to mill a part. We have no record of where Vaucanson learned his mechanics, but his skills were prodigious.

The combination tabor (drum) and flageolet (pennywhistle) player shown at the right in figure 2a was undoubtedly constructed along similar lines; I have not seen an explanation of its mechanism. It would have been simpler, since the flageolet is easier to play than a flute (only four or five finger holes, blown from one end), and machinery to make the right arm beat the drum would be relatively simple to figure out. It seems unlikely the two automata could have been so well synchronized that they played together.

Vaucanson’s Mechanical Duck It always startles me to read things like this anonymous appreciation of Vaucanson’s duck: “It is the most admirable thing imaginable, a piece of human worksmanship almost passing understanding.” I try to account for the powerful attraction that constructing simulacra of lower animals held for men 200 years ago. Still, it catches me off guard to see the adulation the duck evoked. Dr G C Beireis, the fourth owner of the machine in 1785, rhapsodizes, “It was in this duck that Vaucanson’s genius reached its highest point. I have still not got over my astonishment at this work. (He had seen it thirty years earlier.) One single wing contains more than 400 articulated pieces.” I doubt we would feel that way today about an automated Scottie, say, but maybe ducks make better pets.

It was, from all accounts, a singular likeness to a duck, and here is what it did: After a light touch on a point on the base, the duck in the most natural way in the world begins to look around him, eyeing the audience with an intelligent air. His lord and master, however, apparently interprets this differently, for soon he goes off to look for something for the bird to eat. No sooner has he filled a dish with oatmeal porridge than our famished friend plunges his beak deep into it, showing his satisfaction by some characteristic movements of his tail. The way in which he takes the porridge and swallows it greedily is extraordinarily true to life. In next to no time the basin has been half emptied, although on several occasions the bird, as if alarmed by some unfamiliar noises, has raised his head and glanced curiously around him.

After this, satisfied with his frugal meal, he stands up and begins to flap his wings and to stretch himself while expressing his gratitude by several contented quacks. But most astonishing of all are the contractions of the bird’s body clearly showing that his stomach is a little upset by this rapid meal and the effects of a painful digestion become obvious. However, the brave bird holds out, and after a few moments we are convinced in the most concrete manner that he has overcome his internal difficulties. The truth is that the smell which now spreads through the room becomes almost unbearable. We wish to express to the artist inventor the pleasure which his demonstration gave to us. (From Chapuis’ book, Automata: Historical and Technical Study, see detailed bibliography in part 3 of this article.) Something here for everyone, isn’t there? Passion, satisfaction, and a dash of slapstick. The mechanicians in the audience were dazzled by Vaucanson’s skill in building a duck that could swivel its neck in every direction while sitting or standing; this does suggest some remarkable techniques for managing the pushwires ascending the legs, maybe even some internal mechanisms within the body.

Probably written by Vaucanson and certainly based on data only he could have provided, the following passage from an article in a 1777 dictionary of science shows how proud he was of the internal mechanisms that caused grain to be “. . . digested as in real animals by dissolution and not by (grinding) … the inventor does not set this up as a perfect digestive system capable of manufacturing blood and nourishing juices to support the animal, and it would be unfair to reproach him with this shortcoming.” But it is clear how well he knew the 18th century idea that blood comes from food, and he implies he was trying to follow it. Indeed, in some accounts the body was covered by latticework so the interior mechanisms could be viewed as they did their job. Vaucanson had good reason to be proud, for the body contained his new invention, the rubber tube. Any machine capable of making that kind of smell had to be alive!

One wonders what the “…chemical laboratory where the principal part of the food could be decomposed…” mentioned in the article might refer to. It may have been that his rubber tube intestine actually contained some chemicals or enzymes that attacked the starch in oat porridge, causing it “…to leave the body in markedly changed form.” But there was hardly time enough in a performance of a few minutes to convert anything. More likely the operator between performances drained the stomach of its contents and loaded the nether-part of the intestine with the imitation duck dung that so impressed audiences.

The duck and the two musicians probably made a good deal of money for Vaucanson, but because it was necessary to transport them to other capitals of Europe for further exhibition he sold them all in 1743 to showmen who took them to England, Russia, and finally to Germany. In St Petersburg in 1 782 the third owners tinkered with the mechanisms, interchanging parts so they would break if anyone else tried to show them. Dr Beireis had this partly repaired, but when Goethe viewed the duck in 1805, he found, “Vaucanson’s automata were paralyzed. The duck had lost its feathers and, reduced to a skeleton, would still bravely eat its oats, but could no longer digest them.” The duck was 108 years old when Rechsteiner, a skilled mechanician, was hired to repair it. It was exhibited in Italy in 1844 and in London two years later. After that it dropped out of sight. Some photographs turned up in the early 1950s, evidently left by the former curator of the Paris Museum of Arts and Crafts. They are glass plate negatives that probably date from before 1900. The skeleton they reveal, together with the appearance of the mechanism, strongly suggests the wreckage of Vaucanson’s duck, as they were labelled. The plates were said to be from Dresden, and if the duck survived World War II, one hopes it is in a dry attic. The musicians were lost from sight sometime around 1800. None of the imitations of Vaucanson’s automata, including mekaniker Rechsteiner’s duplicate duck, now survives. These wondrous mechanisms are altogether lost.

Vaucanson himself seems to have prospered (he was a member of the Academy of Science in 1777) and continued inventing. In 1741 he devised the system of punched cards that controlled looms in the Jacquard tapestry factory. This is generally considered to be the first digital number storage and readout system. In 1760 he invented the modern metal-cutting lathe, with a shaped guideway to prevent chatter and twisting of the tool.

Mechanism of the Automata While relatively simple to explain and easy to grasp when explained, Vaucanson’s machines really are very sophisticated in performance and embody concepts easily 100 years ahead of their time. The weight-motor is a heavy weight suspended from a rope wrapped around a drum windlass, which, while slowly falling, drives a gear-train (speed controlled by a governor). These gears slowly turn a cam-drum, the master controller “memory” mechanism, one rotation of which equals one performance of the automaton. This drum, perhaps the diameter of a small keg and three feet long, has on its surface an array of rows of studs of some sort, nails or wooden knobs. Cam-followers, some sort of spring loaded levers, ride on the drum surface, one for each row (circle) of studs in the array, and each cam-follower is for a moment pushed out of place if a stud rotates by to push on it.

There are as many circles of studs on the drum as there are functions of the automaton to be controlled, and the cam-follower unique to that circle of studs does the controlling. Thus, one row, say, controls the dilation and contraction mechanism of the lips, and another row might manage the movements of the first finger, left hand, and so on. There would be about 12 functions to be controlled, so about 12 rows or circles of studs are on the drum. It is rather like a giant music box movement, except that instead of steel needles being plucked, cam-followers are displaced, and with displacement each follower pulls on a flexible cable which is linked by its own pulley system to the finger, lip, or valve that is unique to it. In some cases, like the lip control mechanism, the requirement to produce music is for smooth variation from one size to another, so the row of studs for that function is replaced by a smoothly varying curve, a cam. In other cases, the fingering mechanism, a finger either does or does not cover a flute hole. This is digital control (the word comes from counting on the fingers); the former is analog, meaning that a little movement here causes a proportional movement there.

When it is all put together and regulated carefully, the machine will play the flute using wind pressures as selected by the distributor valve. For the sake of impressive appearance, the machine is covered with a wooden framework in human shape and is clothed, but it would do its job bare. However, it would look like a machine and not a person.

The tabor and flageolet player is similar, but probably only two levels of wind were employed, and the fingering is simpler, probably four fingers.

The duck was essentially a giant version of the mechanism that operated the bird figures described earlier but with many more, and more complex, movements. While it is possible that some weight sensitive area was built into the pedestal so that the duck started to gobble the food only when a plate was placed before it, it seems much more likely that the operator carefully memorized the duck’s movements (which, of course, are identical every time) and returned with the plate at just the right moment. Otherwise the bird would have been gulping down thin air.

If they still existed, these machines would provide an intriguing catalog of early 18th century movements, probably including some that Vaucanson devised for special purposes that would not be rediscovered for 75 years or more. But, as computers, the machines were incredible. Here, 240 years ago, was a digital and analog computer preprogrammed with perhaps 300 to 500 bytes of read only memory, each byte 10 or 12 bits wide. Vaucanson appears to be the first person to have seen the need for synchronous control of multiple functions (how else could you play a flute except by regulating breath angle and pressure while simultaneously fingering the proper notes?) as well as the first who saw the possibility of designing mechanisms to effect such control. That he used the music box spindle approach to his problem is not to his discredit, for that mechanism was known to function reliably over long periods while undergoing little wear. His incorporation of music box memory devices into an array on a single drum (the master controller) enabled him to produce some remarkable results. He could control a variety of simultaneous, interdependent functions because they were all driven by the same “clock.” This was parallel data processing, in relatively small chunks, to be sure, but parallel beyond doubt. The likes of it were not seen again in mechanics until the player piano with its paper tape. It is not so very different from the way the central nervous system deals with data in many parallel channels simultaneously.

But why is this surprising? Jacques de Vaucanson was attempting to create life. It was his genius to approach the task in the manner of living things.”

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Philadelphia’s 179 Year Old Android

Charles F Penniman
The Franklin Institute
Philadelphia PA 19103

Cuckoo clocks, computers and dolls with rolling eyes somehow fascinate us all. The fascination seems to stem from our delight that people can make contraptions which do things by contrivance that are usually done by living men and beasts. But whatever the reason for it, we find animated statues in ancient China and in the temples of classical Greece. In Europe, the clockmakers of the Renaissance often adorned their works with marvelous moving figures. The famous tower clocks of Berne and Messina and the remarkable clock in the Cathedral at Strasbourg are just a few examples.

For us who live toward the beginning of the Electronic Age, it is hard to imagine the excitement that existed in the early years of mechanism. The automaton at the Franklin Institute that writes poems and draws pictures dates from those times. In the same way that they made machines to perform marvelous and delightful things, we program computers and build microprocessors to perform even more amazing feats. It is much the same phenomenon.

The Franklin Institute’s mechanical lady dressed in green is one of the most important of the small number of androids that have ever been built with the ability to write and draw. The first machine with such capabilities was built around 1750 by Friedrich von Knauss working in Germany, but it was from Pierre Jaquet-Droz, Jean-Frederic Leschot, and a succession of their collaborators that the most elegant machines came. In 1774 they produced their first writing doll in Neuchatel, Switzerland. The machine now at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia was built about 1805 in London by Henri Maillardet, an associate of Leschot and Jaquet-Droz. His automaton is particularly distinguished by its unusually large memory and excellent movements.

The Maillardet machine weighs about 250 pounds (113.4 kg) and consists of a figure kneeling at a writing desk mounted atop an ornate stand containing the program and driving mechanism. Information for the doll’s movements is communicated up through the body of the figure by an incredibly intricate combination of levers, rods, pulleys and cams.

The heart of the writing and drawing operation is actually a mechanical “read only memory” in the form of an array of disk cams rotating on a common shaft to drive the right hand of the figure. The cams are driven by a spring motor located at one end of the base that is coordinated with a second motor located at the other end of the base. This motor is used to slide the stack of operating cams transversely on their shaft into the proper position to produce the desired readout. The information contained in the undulations of the selected set of cam surfaces is picked up by three cam followers linked to the doll’s hand to produce the required right and left, up and down, and vertical motions. There are seven programmed designs from which to choose: two poems in French, one in English, and three graceful pictures. Two designs require four sets of three cams each; the remaining designs are each on three sets of cams. This adds up to a total of 96 operating cams to govern the motions of the right hand of the figure. Additional, and far simpler, cams move the left hand, head and eyes.

The machine is marvelously complex, but perhaps the greatest marvel is that it can still function after nearly 175 years. Apparently very little wear has taken place. The details of the drawings are still remarkably sharp and the writing quite legible. The complex of linkages between the rotating cams and the motions of the hand still operate with no detectable play or slop in the bearings: a considerable achievement for engineering and technology. How this was achieved is largely a matter of conjecture today, but the automaton was built in an age in which trade secrets were kept closely within the circle of one’s apprentices and family. It would be interesting, for instance, to know exactly how the machine was programmed. One can speculate that the profiles of the cams were laid out after the doll was constructed by moving its hand over a master drawing and tracing the corresponding motions of the three cam followers on simultaneously rotating disks of brass which were then cut and filed to their proper shapes. Yet, this is only a guess. The only thing that we know for certain in this regard is that the profiling of the cams had to be done with the greatest care and precision since there is up to a tenfold magnification of any possible error due to the multiplying effect of the linkage be- tween the cam followers and the writing instrument in the doll’s hand.

Some of the elaborate and delicate mechanisms that Maillardet made were sold to the wealthy. Occasionally they were commissioned as state gifts. In fact, the only other doll with the ability to write that can be attributed directly to Henri Maillardet was made for King George III to give to the Emperor of China during a period when the English were attempting to establish favorable trade relations with that country. That machine was programmed to write, in Chinese, flattering messages to the Emperor. It made the trip to China successfully and is reported to be alive and well in a museum in Peking. However, most of the automata that were built, including the one at The Franklin Institute, went into show business and toured all over Europe. Surviving advertisements attest to their popularity. Through newspaper clippings, the progress of the Philadelphia machine can be traced from France to Russia and throughout England until 1850. It is possible, but not altogether certain, that it was purchased at about that time by the great American showman, P T Barnum, for his American Museum. By some process, now unclear, it came to be owned by a Philadelphian, John Penn Brock, whose grandchildren donated it to The Franklin Institute. Perhaps it was the fire that destroyed the museum Barnum set up in Philadelphia that damaged the machine, but it was indeed a charred mass of wreckage when it was delivered to The Franklin Institute in November of 1928. Although Maillardet had his automaton originally fitted out as a little boy in court dress, by the time it came to The Institute, the costume had been changed to that of a French soldier. At The Institute, the machine was stored in one place and then in another until a staff machinist, Charles Roberts, became interested in trying to repair it. He was tremendously proud of his success in doing so as, indeed, he should have been. New clothes were made, but this time the doll was put into a dress instead of a boy’s suit. The restoration of the original motion of dipping a pen (or perhaps it was a brush) into an inkwell turned out to be impossible. Roberts substituted a stylograph pen which has since been replaced by a totally unhistorical, but much more convenient, ballpoint pen. And, of course, it was necessary to make a number of new parts, but the only significant alterations made were to the writing instrument and to the sex of the doll.

Tradition in the Brock family had it that the automaton had been built by Maelzel, a considerable showman, the inventor of a metronome, and the builder of a number of automata. In his memoirs, P T Barnum records the purchase of several automata from him. But after being repaired, the automaton herself set things right when her memory was read out. Following the last line of her last poem, the hand continued to write in its clear but quaint style: “Ecrit par L’Automate de Maillardet,” meaning “Written by Maillardet’s Automaton.” With this clue, locked for nearly 90 years in the memory of the machine, it was possible to search out and determine its proper origin.

The one English poem that she knows how to write (see page 102) is as follows:

Unerring is my hand, tho’ small.

May I not add with truth:
I do my best to please you all;
Encourage, then, my youth.

Certainly her hand cannot be as unerring as it was in 1805. It would be interesting to have a sample of her writing from that time to make a comparison. But she still does her best to please and amaze us.”

You May Have Seen Her in Action …

In an excellent WGBH NOVA presentation on “Artificial Intelligence” aired on public television stations in March 1978, The Franklin Institute automaton by Maillardet may have been seen in action by many readers. (Also seen in action were robots NEWT and Shakey of contemporary vintage. The program also featured interviews with science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, and a number of artificial intelligence researchers regarding the prospects for the near and far future of smart machine technology.)

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Mechanical Man Amazes ‘Frisco
A MECHANICAL man almost nine feet tall is frequently seen parading the streets of San Francisco. He talks, he walks, he sings songs, and he tells amazed pedestrians all about the local movie shows.

This robot, however, is all a delusion and a snare. In truth, he is not a robot at all, but a real man all dressed up in a metal suit, who “talks” through a big loud speaker mouth.

Mechanical Wonder Man Is Operated By Radio Control

“ROBIE,” a mechanical robot walks, talks, smokes and winks his eyes when electrical impulses are transmitted to his “radio” brain. The unusual animated character is the work of Arthur Wilson, of Chicago, Illinois. More than a year’s work and the assistance of three men were required to perfect the robot which is constructed of sheet metal and wood.

The interior of the mechanical wonder man is a maze of electrical apparatus which is used in providing speech and motion. A special receiver picks up the shortwave impulses sent out by his remote controlled mind, station W9X10, to provide animation.

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From Steam Engines to Robots… The Hierarchies of Robotic Devices

By F. W. Chesson

The defining of just what constitutes a robot has been dimmed by anthropological bias, or the impediment of seeing the robotic scene through Human-Colored glasses. That shambling and amiable tin-man traveler, on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz may be far more acceptable to the viewer than the most complex but immobile logic device. Consequently, there’s the rub … or byte! When does a computer become a robot brain?

In order to examine these perplexing and contemporary questions, it will be useful to consider and, if possible, categorize the various hierarchies of the robot or cybernetic world. To start with, there is the pre-robotic environment of the servo-mechanism, with its self-balancing feedback loop(s). Even at this primitive level, the feedback loop is itself subject ot varying levels of complexity, interaction, and adaptability. Adaptability is the most essential feature of any organism, animal, vegetable or servo.

Feedback is that quality which immediately separates a large category of objects and systems. The most elaborate-appearing mechanism is nothing in comparison, when put beside a tiny device endowed with the quality of governing its activities in proportion to the varying intensity of its input stimuli, and output responses.

The word Cybernetic, the steersman of classical Greek, comes from the feedback concept. Here is the helmsman, who senses the movement of wind and wave, and adjusts the rudder accordingly to keep the ship upon her course.

One of the earliest known feedback devices was the Baille-Ble, or mill-hopper, described as far back as 1588. Its use in water or windmills was to distribute the grain to the millstones, according to the rate of speed of the mill’s drive shaft. Such feedback factors as grain flow, grain hardness, millstone tension, and drive shaft force, all interacted to determine the amount of grain delivered to the stones.

This was, of course, a very primitive level of feedback, the grain-hopper receiving four jolts for every revolution of the shaft. Man, in the form of the miller, was still required to optimize conditions and design goals by regulating the flow of water to the drive wheel or the wind pressure upon the sails, and to adjust the proximity of the millstones.

Not until the late 18th Century did a more familiar feedback device appear. This was the fly-ball governor, another contribution of James Watt to the perfection steam power. The governor consisted of a pair of iron balls at the ends of hinged arms, and linked to the engine’s drive shaft. As the shaft speed increased, the balls rotated ever faster, responding to centrifugal force and causing the linkages to move. This movement was coupled to the steam supply throttle, causing it to cut off the steam with increased speed and to open the valve as the shaft velocity slowed. The fly-ball governor continued in use well into the electrical age and was even employed with early phonograph motors.

The 19th Century saw, too, the growth of hydraulics as a science, and feedback also appeared here in the form of Leon Farcot’s Servo-Motor of 1868. Feedback was also discernable in nature, with many writers commenting upon it in terms of the dependency and population oscillations of predator and prey animals, to the conservation of energy in the Solar Phoenix Cycle.

World War II saw research and application of feedback and servomechanisms advance under the pressure of wartime. Bombsights, anti-aircraft gun directors, and radar all fused into integrated systems.

These early analog and digital devices converged irrestibly towards today’s state of the art, where the external analog world is sensed, converted to, and processed digitally, then reacted upon by analog extensions. Any device which aspires to the name robot is therefore bound to the laws of feedback and stability, if only to maintain an external upright position, or an internal state of data-processing stability. Negative feedback converges and conserves. Positive feedback diverges into randomness and disorder. The first mechanic who managed to assemble a fly-ball governor in reverse discovered this, as the steam engine’s speed increased to the literal breaking point. His descendent, at his op-amp breadboard, is no less dismayed as he discovers a hidden glitch of oscillations emerging from his clean-looking Bode Diagram.

Two post-war inventions which captured much popular interest in servo-systems were the Homeostats of W. Ross Ashby, and the “Tortoises” of W. Grey Walter. In the literary area there was Dr. Norbert Wiener’s monumental Cybernetics, accompanied by, in the science-fiction realm, such classics as Asimov’s I, Robot.

The Homeostat was, in essence, an interconnected complex (usually four) servo units, so organized that a disturbance to the input of any one unit would reflect throughout all the others, and result in a mutual attempt to restore their state of equilibrium, or homeostasis. This dynamic balance, whose name was coined by Dr. Walter B. Cannon, circa 1930 in his book The Wisdom of the Body, expresses the essential requirements for all living creatures, and continuity-seeking mechanisms. Here, simple feedback is transcended by an integrated, responsive, and variable feedback, constantly adopting to external and internal variations.

The other device, or family of devices, came from the investigations of Dr. William Grey Walter, of the Burden Neurological Institute of Bristol, England. Being mobile, the “tortoises” were more visually attractive than the static Homeostats, but perhaps less sophisticated in theory. Basically, they were obstacle-avoiding automata, attracted to light up to a certain level, but repelled by a greater intensity. Later models could home in on a lamp flashing at a certain frequency to recharge their batteries. Their phototropism had been anticipated by “Philidog,” the creation of M. Piraux of the Philips organization in France, which was demonstrated at the Paris International Radio Exhibition of 1929. The “dog” would follow the movements of a flashlight, but when the lamp was put too close to his nose, he “became annoyed and started to bark!”

Photopnobia, for high illumination levels, could well have been included in a robot dog built (probably by Westinghouse) for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was designed to home in on visitors by sensing their body heat and to “bite” their legs. But, just before the exhibit’s opening, it was attracted by the headlights of a passing automobile, and charged out an open door like a four-legged kamikaze and was run over, despite the startled driver’s efforts to avoid it. If this robot tragedy offers any lesson, it is that prospective designers of automata should consider all possible environmental influences upon their future creations, and then try to program for at least N + 1 contingencies.

The ability to learn from experience, rather than continually react in the same manner, can be considered a prime requisite for any progressive artificial intelligence. A robot turtle which finds, by trial and error, its way through a maze is interesting only from a hardware standpoint. If its evolutionary successor should record only those turns which did not lead to blind alleys, and thus retrace its path through short order, it may be tentatively applauded.

More sophisticated, however, is the mechanism (or living person!) which purposefully sets out on a different route each trial, to see if there is not an even shorter way through the maze. Finally, there comes the entity which evaluates the design of each previous maze it has run, to predict the configuration of the new one, and therefore how best to optimize each trial run to come. For maze, substitute problem, or task-area, or environment, and we see the evolution of an artificial or real intelligence in its true light.

Proceeding through the robot hierarchy, we come upon a host of diverse and interesting devices, the simulators. If their repetoir is limited and their application highly specialized, they yet have a story of successful problem solving to tell. They present a controlled environment for the student, (human or robot), to enter and manipulate, according to programmed conditions and problems. That early flight simulator, the Link Trainer of World War II, was a pre-flight instructor for thousands of airmen. It provided realistic banks and turns in response to control movements, furnished excellent instrument-flight training, and was virtually crash-proof.

Simulating animal behavior has fascinated Man since Antiquity. Tales of magic horses, brazen warriors, and unbeatable chess-players have caught the attention of writers from the Arabian Nights down through Edgar Allen Poe. The experiments with dogs relating to Classical Conditioning by Dr. Pavlov, earning him the Nobel Price for Medicine and Physiology in 1904, have been simulated over the years, culminating with today’s extensive computer programs.

The robot dogs shown in the photograph were developed by the author in the early Sixties, when the teaching-machine “fad” was approaching its heady zenith. At the time of the design, relay logic still had some cost advantages over the contemporary RTL gates, but some transistors were employed for the “eyes” and “ears” of the automated canines.

Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning experiments underly much of modern learning theory; hence, if a robot, android, or humanoid is to learn, it is desirable to know what conditioning is all about. On a basic level, Pavlov rang a bell, then fed the dog, measuring the animal’s response by the amount of saliva generated. After a while, the bell alone could evoke a salivatory reaction. On a human level, do our mouths not water at the mere aroma of a tasty pie? Or even at the verbal cue that: “Dinner’s ready!” …? Of course, should the announcement prove false or premature, our anticipatory response will diminish markedly. It can, however, be readily restored, along with our faith in human nature.

The electro-mechanical dog was designed to perform the following simulations, which will be examined: conditioning (learning), extinction (forgetting), spontaneous recovery, higher order conditioning, learning curves, memory of stimuli occurrences, and stimuli hierarchy.

In general operation of the simulator, pressing the RESET switch puts the robot dog at an untrained level (electronic brainwash!). Salivation being somewhat difficult to imitate, the response to feeding was represented by having the dog wag its tail, a readily observable act of canine satisfaction. To attract the interest of younger students, the feeding stimulus was simulated via a plastic bone having a concealed magnet. When the magnet end of the bone was in proximity to the dog’s “nose,” a reed switch was closed, activating a tail-wagging power transistor and solenoid.

Via a microphone and photocell, the dog could “hear”

and “see.” Normally, the audio stimulus was dominant, activating a Schmitt-trigger delay for a pre-set time interval. If the food stimulus was presented during this period, an AND gate caused this coincidence to be recorded by the Conditioning Counter, a ten-point stepping relay. Today’s equivalent would probably be a CMOS type 4017 decimal-decoded counter chip. When a preset number of coincidences, say four, had been registered, a form of relay flip-flop circuitry caused the dog to wag its tail to the sound stimulus as well as to food.

As long as an occasional sound-food coincidence, (reinforcement), occurred, the conditioned state would be maintained. But after another preset number of sound-stimuli without food following, (anticoincidence), say five, the flip-flop resets the dog to an unconditioned state, and it must be retauqht.

Sometimes, the experimenters found that their animals would recover their condition, (spontaneous recovery), without any apparent external action. This is similar to being given a telephone number in the afternoon, forgetting it totally by night, yet having it suddenly come to mind the next morning, apparently released from some buffer-storage deep in the subconscious. In the simulator, the spontaneous recovery function may be cut in and its “latent period” set by a potentiometer. Should normal conditioning be re-established before it can act, it is reset for future use. Once it has acted, however, it is of a one-shot nature; following a second extinction, true conditioning must follow for the SR circuit to be reset.

After conditioning and extinction, Pavlov found that his dogs not only relearned faster, but that their conditioned response was more resistant to extinction. This learning curve holds true in human education, as anyone who has learned a mathematical equation or foreign language will agree. Learning something the second time around nearly always is quicker and seems to stick longer as well.

The learning curve simulation required multi-level stepping-relays in the original model, whose pick-off points were determined in connection with the original settings for conditioning and extinction counts. Thus, the original number of four coincidences would be reduced to three and then only one, while the anti-coincidences for extinction might be increased from five to six or seven, and then to eight or ten.

When the living dog has been very well trained to salivate to the sound of the bell, it was found that the bell as well as food could be employed to condition him to a new stimulus, such as light. This is higher order conditioning, and represented the simulator’s highest accomplishment, being activated by the learning curve counter.

While the above model and its concepts are quite elementary, they nevertheless furnish a base upon which increasingly diverse and subtle forms of learning behavior may be simulated and explored. It has been found, for example, that conditioning is more resistant to extinction when every trial stimulus is not always rewarded, this variable reinforcement scheduling, could lend itself readily to microprogramming applications.

Leaving the fascinating domain of the simulators, we ascend to new heights of cybernetic sophistication, in- habited by mechanisms gifted with wide degrees of freedom. Now the question becomes, what constitutes a robot? Mobility, while attractive, is neither necessary nor sufficient. Humanoid, or even animal, form does seem to hold an almost irresistible appeal.

In the area of humanoid forms, there arises another dilemma of differentiation; robots versus androids. Androids, according to established science fiction traditions, are human appearing automata, either clad in realistic plastic flesh over a mechanical superstructure, or else composed of natural organic compounds. The latter may be laboratory-made flesh and blood, or like Dr. Frankenstein;s unique creation, reassembled from second hand au-natural ingredients. The media generally favor the purely mechanistic robotic form, ranging from the lumbering “Robbie” of the old “Lost in Space” television series, to the engaging Laurel and Hardyesque of the “Star Wars” movie. The recently terminated TV series “Logan’s Run” opted for the android version.

When it comes to what defines a robot, we may consult a table appearing in the book “Thinking by Machine,” by the French scientist Pierre de Latil. Here, the various levels of automation are presented, commencing with simple tools and climaxing with a god-like entity, which determines its own matter for creation. Somewhere in the middle are thinking machines contemporary to our present technology or waiting in the wings to make their entrance. Perhaps some do not care to appear, preferring to remain behind the scenes, pulling the strings of human puppets!

SOME ROBOTIC HIERARCHIES A remote printout or video terminal hardly seems to qualify for any level of robot society, yet, put it on wheels, (or legs), and program it to make the rounds of an office full of human operatives, and its status is considerably elevated. It is almost entirely directed by some remote intelligence, having little more initiative than to signal back that it has encountered an unprogrammed obstacle in its accustomed path, or that human operative Number 6SJ7 is requiring excessive copies of printout forms, which may just be ending up as paper airplanes.

From this motorized mail clerk, it is a few steps upwards to the servo-secretary. Our tin person may be of limited aptitude, but whether clad in pink plastic or bright brass-work, it ambulates on two good legs, though auxiliary training wheels may be necessary for those pesky stairways. Avoidance of persons and other randomly appearing obstacles is possible through built in subroutines, but all sensory inputs are monitored by the remote brain which takes over at the slightest deviation. Our servo-serf may even be subserviant to a robot foreman, who may have the responsibility for an entire office floor or production line subsection.

Our supervisor robot could exhibit an increased status by competently handling a variety of problems in the daily routine so that the most efficient use may be made of the workers. He may communicate with both his master CPU and authorized humans, to accommodate schedule changes and cope with emergencies. At all times, however, the servo-supervisor should remain properly defferential towards the lowliest office person.

If socially interacting robots are going to encounter the public at large, they will have to obey, in general, the Three Laws of Robotics, as set forth by Dr. Isaac Asimov:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A rbot must obey the commands given by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence, so long as this does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Within these rigid appearing laws, there may have to be room for various subsections and clauses, tailored to meet evolutionary robot technology. For instance, under what circumstances must a robot obey an android? Does the outward appearance of human flesh take precedence over computing ability? Will some robots obey other robots rather than men, and hold silicon oil more sacred than red blood? Truly, like all Holy Writ, the Three Laws will be subject to human and robotic interpretation.

As indicated above, the social robot will be subject to vastly greater memory and decision-making needs. His state of liberation from a restricted operating environment will depend not only on his command status with other entities, but by his capacity to cope with short and long-term goals and their modifications. All, of course, in addition to general housekeeping requirements, such as balance, walking, (or other forms of locomotion, not excluding water propulsion and flying), obstacle avoidance, sensor input monitoring of potential dangers, internal monitoring of CPU and memory functions and redundant circuits, and naturally the sense to come home for a battery charge or atomic pile replacement.

The more integrated the robot, the less it must obey the commands of the external world. If it is linked at all to other robots or a master brain, it is only for consultation of common goals or problems. Data shared and compared, it announces to a waiting human that everyone in the 9002-Class had better be retro-fitted with 25-GHz data-links in no less than 103.75 hours, or there will be a cybernetic job action that will make the Great Servo-Strike of ’98 look like a party by comparison.

While the very free robot may contemplate the status obtained in commanding a whole army of subordinates who execute such routine duties as interfacing with mere humans, and other feedback-flunkies, the Hardware Hobgoblin slips into his DO-Loop reveries. State-of-the-art memory has failed, in the face of sheer volume, to meet the exponential rise of bit requirements. The robot master must give up his cherished mobility, delegating sensory input and decision output to a host of lessor but ambulatory surrogates, which we have passed on the way up.

Near the top of the hierarchy pyramid, there is room for but a few of the elite. These converse, when necessary, in twittering tera-hertz, of things beyond the ken of long vanished mortal minds, having taken creation from the hands of their creators.

What is the future for the lonely lords? May they destroy their human designers in war games suddenly turned real? Will they compete via servo-soldiers for the vanishing material and energy resources of the depopulated and plundered planet? Or will our robots survive us, to spread a vanished mankind’s eternal message of Hope throughout the galaxy, perhaps appearing in android skins before the wondering eyes of simple shepherds on a Distant Star?

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The History of Robots

By Forest J. Ackerman

This article is excerpted from a record made by the author. Consequently, to enjoy it to its utmost, turn off all the lights but one, sit back in your easy chair and read. As you read, you will find yourself being taken on a fantastic journey into the world of robots.
—Editor

Hello, this is Forrest Ackerman, Editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Spacemen. I’ve heard from thousands and thousands of you fans since the world’s original film monster magazine began in 1958, and many’s the time I wished that I was the beast with a million eyes — in order to read all your letters quicker. Well, having heard from all of you, it seems only fair — doesn’t it — that you should hear from all of me.

As you probably guessed, I’m Doctor Ackula and Karlon Torgosi and his sister Vespertina. (Vespertina is the Transylvanian word for bat.) I’m also Weaver Wright and Spencer Strong and a long list of other names, including Mechanical Man and Robot Mitchum.

I’ve been interested in robots for about 35 years and as a boy of ten, I had the thrilling experience of seeing the great film masterpiece “Metropolis” when it was brand new. It was a silent picture produced in the mid-twenties and the most unforgettable scene was when the robot was animated. When that smooth, streamlined mechanical humanoid figure was commanded to rise by Rotwang, its creator, and slowly, ever so slowly, an inch at a time, almost like Im-ho-tep, the Egyptian mummy dead 3700 years, the robot moved and came to life. You could almost hear the whirring as Rotwang, his artificial hand covered with a black leather glove, ordered his robotrix — it was in female form, you see — to rise from her chair and present her cold, steel hand to John Masterman, the master of Metropolis — the greatest city on earth in the year 2026. Twenty Twenty-six, hmm. Come to think of it, that’s quite a few years yet.

Do you suppose we’ll have to wait that long to see real robots? I doubt it. Actually, already the robots are among us. And that’s the title of a fascinating book by Rolf Strehl. He says that, fantastic as it may seem, the time may one day come when the man on the streets may be as rare a sight as a horse is today.

Robot chess players may not seem very alarming, Mr. Strehl says, and electronic calculators that can perform in a minute the work of ten men laboring ceaselessly for a hundred years are an obvious advantage. But what of the robot spy? The guided missile with its atomic warhead satellite eyes in the skies.

The disturbing incident of the robot that ran amuck and Frankenstein-like murdered its creator. Of lengendary origin is our first information about the artificial beings known as androids. Aristotle described the wooden Venus, capable of movement, whose limbs were filled with mercury instead of blood.

During the third century, B.C., a flying wooden pigeon was reported.

In the tenth century, A.D., we hear of the creation of an automatic talking head. The great genius Leonardo de Vinci built a moving metal lion for King Louis XII and also created a metal dragon.

Leonard Maelzl, the man who invented the Metronome, created a sensation during his life time with a musical android completed in 1807. He also demonstrated a chess machine which inspired Edgar Allen Poe to write “Maraville’s Chessman.”

In 1778, Baron Kempleman of Bohemia, publicly demonstrated the first talking robot. The first machine to speak through artificial means. A publication of the day reported that “the monstrous thing spoke with a voice of a three to four year old child, in a distinct, clear and slow voice.”

In the French play “The Revolt of the Machines,” huge angles, super tractors, gigantic cranes, mechanical saws, dynamic dredgers, even psychological thought-reading devices clash with one another in the hall of a great exhibition. During the night, the machines break through the walls of the auditorium and run wild in the streets — destroying homes, knocking over towers, devastating fields. Military might is mobilized and army artillery is dispatched to destroy the machine monsters. But the guns, and tanks and cannons refuse to fire on their fellow machines, and instead join the rebels. A few human beings escaped and from a mountain side watched the destruction of their man-made world. Finally, the foreman of the machines succeeds in turning them against one another, but in the ensuing civil war they completely destroy each other. But the foreman is already at work on new, even more monstrous machines. And the likelihood is that it will happen all over again.

In his play, “Millenium I,” W.A. Dwiggins pictured another possible revolt of the robots. “Millenium I” is a frightening play about Homogrub, sub-terranian man, hiding from murderous machines which possess incredibly powerful means of destruction. At one point of the play, a human being named Blackmaster encounters Point 33 Plus, a robot. And the robot says: “In the beginning was man. Man created all things. Man, with his infinite skill, created machines in his own image.” Black-master interrupts, “No, no. Not like himself. That was not the idea. Much better than himself. Finer. Stronger. Man made you and we were proud of you but we made you too strong. You broke away from us. We lost control of you. You trampled us into the dust. So now we’ve come to turn you back into the earth again. Into the salts of metals. Back into the earth out of which we made you.”

And now, inevitably, we come to “R U R — Rossums Universal Robots.” The famous play that introduced the word ‘robot’ into the English language. The story, as summarized by Sam Moskowitz, is a tale laid in the near future, on an island whose exact location is not specified. Here the formula that chemically produced artificial humans for use as workers and servants had been adapted to mass production. The manufacturers justified their position on the grounds that eventually robots will free men from all toil and a Utopia will emerge. Unfortunately, one of the chemists alters the formula, and the robots who hitherto had been without emotions, assume the desires for freedom and domination that previously had been characteristic only of the human race.

The emotionally advanced leaders among the robots organized a revolt of their ranks, which now number millions in key positions throughout the world. The rule of man is cast off and the human race is ruthlessly exterminated. At play on their little island, the robot manufacturers suspensefully stave off robot attack, but are betrayed by the president of the Humanitarian League, who even burns Rossum’s original formula for the creation of robots. Remorselessly, the robots destroy all but one man who makes amend to rediscover Rossum’s formula. They offer him the world if he can held them rediscover the secret of the creation of life. However, he is only a builder, not a scientist, and cannot duplicate the method.

In the end, mutant robots named Helena and Pymus become the Adam and Eve of the new android world.

In the films, robots, androids and humanoids came to the screen in “Alita,” an early Russian space film of a trip to Mars and a finding of a robot civilization; in “Captain Video,” “The Colossus of New York,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,”—with the great Gort, the heroic robot from space—”Devil Girl from Mars,” “Forbidden Planet” —with the friendly voice of Martin Milner as Robbie— “Robot Monster,” “Target Earth,” “Togar the Great,” “The Tonkie,”—about a crazy, mixed-up T.V. set from the future that could move about—”Vampires Over London” with Bela Lugosi and many, many others.

Television gave us the notable Alfred Bester play “Murder and the Android.”

And now, if you will accompany me on a journey to the future, and a visit to a robot factory. Mr. Wells has kindly lent me his time machine. And Mr. Pal has graciously taught me how to operate it, so that we will not only get to the future, but be sure of getting back. There is one thing you must understand, however, before we take off. We can only go as observers and cannot actually intermingle. If we were to get into the future and get involved, there could be some disastrous results. Suppose, for example, a time traveler went back to 1926 and kidnapped me so that I never saw “Metropolis.” Why, then this story might never have existed. So whatever you do, don’t leave the electronic field of our time machine.

O.K.? Fasten your safety belt. 1970 80 90 2000 — Wow, travelled so fast, here we are in 2050 already.

Say, isn’t that a nifty rocket car that robot is assembling? It doesn’t look like it needs any type of tires or wheels. Look at that amazing sight over there, suspended in mid-air; great luminescent side — must be supported by an anti-gravitic principle. Let’s see, it says right — yes, it’s the three laws of robotics propounded by the great Dr. Asimov back in the middle of the 20th century. The red sign reads: “A robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.” The yellow one says: “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.” And the white one: “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.” Very sensible rules.

Robots must — GOOD HEAVENS, the cable snapped. It’s holding together by a shred of metal. The man there — the foreman — right below a car dangling over his head! I don’t think he sees the danger. The robots, the robot’s super sensitive photoeletric cells must have detected the danger. The robot’s now leaping at the startled man, who thinks he’s gone mad and attacking him. Now he looks up and he sees the danger too late. At the last moment the robot has swept up the foreman in his huge steel arms and tossed him out of the path of the plunging steel object. The dazed man is being helped to his feet by two other robots. He looks at the mass of twisted wreckage, and realizes it is the robot who has saved his life that lies smashed underneath. Smashed beyond repair. The faithful mechanical servant, saved his life at the sacrifice of its own.

Well, that was some experience. Now, just let me adjust this spacial control and we’ll move to another observation point.

There’s a sign ahead. “Fifty Miles to Rossum City — Population: 2 Million . . . Robots — Speed Limit: 200 Miles Per Hour.”

There is a jet car literally flying down the road; seems to be going faster than that that. Oh, oh! Police plane has spotted it. It’s zooming down, broadcasting instructions to stop. Well, I’ll be! It’s a robot at the controls of the car. And the police are robots, too. I see what’s happened. The robot driver has a human passenger who’s been hurt, and he’s rushing him to a hospital. The robot police are now moving the man to their plane, and there they go.

Wow! What a world! Wish I had time to stay here and sight see all over the planet, but the warning bell on my time machine has sounded, letting me know it’s time to return to our world and our own time. Hang on.

Well, wasn’t that something. That glimpse of the robotic world of the future. You know, something occurred to me while watching those automatons function. They look a lot like men, do much of man’s work. I wonder if . . . excuse me a second. Calling electronics department, please. Hi, Frank. Forrest Ackerman. Say, Frank, you’re a sound effects man always fooling around with electronic devices. Tell me, do you suppose robots would enjoy listening to music? I’m not joking. You think that if robots are an electronic creation that they enjoy listening to electronic music? So by utilizing the variable frequency audible generator you think you could create a scientific symphony? It would not only send our metal friends, but would also be fascinating to human ears. Would you be willing to work on it? You already have?! I can’t wait to hear it.

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Star Wars Special Production and Mechanical Effects

By John Stears
Special Production and Mechanical Effects Supervisor “Star Wars”

Although the robots that appeared in “Star Wars” were not true robots, they did stir a great deal of interest. Consequently, we asked the genius behind them, John Stears, to give us an idea of what went into their design.

We would like to thank the Star Wars Corporation, and Twentieth Century-Fox Corporation, for giving us permission to use this story. —Editor

DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN OF ALL ARTOO-DETOO ROBOTS

(In conjunction with the production designer, who was responsible for their general appearance.) The problems were many, inasmuch that the director wanted to use a human as much as he could so as not to loose the character to a pure mechanical machine. This posed the question of how small a human, sufficiently coordinated and physically able, could be found. I obviously had to design my robot around the person selected, bearing in mind the limitations of what the operator inside could possibly do without undue strain, as he was to be inside for long periods in the discomfort of the desert sun and the studio lighting.

After selecting our midget (Kenny Baker), the first problem was to make him as comfortable as possible, yet make his shell as small as we could. This was accomplished by a harness over his shoulders attached to a seat. This took the weight off him until we were ready to turn the camera, the robot being supported externally until the last second. One of the big problems, as you can see, was weight, and how to keep it as low as possible.

The next major problem was how to get him to walk. The various types of surfaces he had to walk on were to range from soft sand, salt often saturated, uneven stones and shiny slippery studio sets. One added disadvantage was that often it was not to be a level surface.

This was achieved by various types of surface on his boots, which ranged from a series of non-return rollers to give a forward movement, to others which had a number of spring loaded balls on each side of the boot, which enabled him to sway from side to side. A very important factor was vision for the man inside to enable him to walk to his marks and most important to keep his balance. This was done by a one-way lens in the detachable head, which was on roller bearings to allow it to be turned 360 degrees by the operator (Kenny), although he could turn his head from side to side. The actual majority of weight which was displaced when he walked, i.e., the side to side action, was assisted by spring loaded pistons placed externally on the legs.

The external arms which had to function were counterbalanced in order to let the operator lift and perform the various tasks required. The amount of room he had to move his fingers, which were of short stumpy type associated with dwarf genetics, was possibly no more than 1″.

In order to give Artoo-Detoo a visible change in mood, I used fibre optics, which in turn illuminated a panel in the head. Using colors to give the effect of a change in mood was accomplished by using a single light source with a motorized color wheel.

Other light sources were installed for the hologram projector, all of which were powered by high-output, jelly-type non-spill batteries.

There was nothing used in the manufacture of both Artoo’s which was not machined, with the exception of the viewing lens. I was totally responsible for their creation, apart of course, from their conception, which was George Lucas’s; and their cosmetics which, as I said, Was done in conjunction with the art director.

A mechanical version was necessary because in order to move quickly a third leg had to be dropped in the center in action, which allowed it to be steerable. Infinite speed up to 7 mph was achieved through twin high torque motors mounted in the feet of the outside legs. The steering was by a two wheel mechanism in the front leg, the name of which does not exist and made no sense to anyone until it was installed and worked.

Mechanical Artoo was controlled by using a conventional radio transmitter and receiver as is used for flying models and boats. The servos in turn were hooked up to various relays and speed controllers for the operations required. The main power was supplied by a series of 6 volt jelly batteries.

Although everything checked out beautifully on the one and only test it had in the studio, we had a bad time for a few hours in the desert. A sand storm, which created very bad static, affected our transmitter range. This resulted in Artoo-Detoo and Threepio appearing to copulate in front of the unit in the middle of the desert. Up until now it appears to have been futile, but one can’t be too sure of the gestation period of robots.

Apart from this incident, and a bit of damage to the dropping leg caused in transit, all the robots functioned well.

TREAD ROBOTS

There were four of these, which are incidental to the two principal robots, Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio.

The Baby Box is the odd one out here because it functioned in the Death Star only. It is the little black box which careens around doing its thing, which includes a little cameo of mine in the reaction it gives when it sees the Wookie. It screeches to a halt and does an immediate about-turn and shoots off at an alarming rate in the opposite direction. There were several of these Baby Box Robots, some of which pulled many trucks behind them.

The Dome Robot as seen with the others by The Sand Crawler is really, in my view, the power source for the others to re-charge themselves by. Inside the smoked perspex dome is a rotating solar panel by means of which it collects solar energy and stores it for the other robots to plug in and recharge their own batteries.

The Stick Robot, which assists Luke at the vaporizing units, had a pneumatically operated arm. Unfortunately it is not featured in the final cut.

The Umbrella Robot has electrically powered features and a pneumatic scoop for collecting soil samples.

All of these robots were radio controlled. The main problem was the terrain they were to be operated in: hard compressed sand, loose sand, dry salt, wet salt and small rocky areas. They had to be very powerful and weighed in at around 250 pounds each. They had to be capable of handling steep grades and turn in their own length. The biggest problem I had was to make a self-cleaning tank track; one which would not push itself or the wheels through a build up of sand, etc., but would stay put no matter what. On close inspection you will see how I did this. Radio controlled model aircraft is one of my hobbies, which enabled me to operate the robots with any sort of precision. I had a few problems when my crew members had to operate them, because of more than one robot in a shot. They did very well, though.

SEE-THREEPIO

See-Threepio, being a humanoid, I was not involved with, apart from helping out with articulation problems and his illuminated eyes. These I accomplished with one way lenses, incorporating the light source.

I was responsible entirely for his oil bath.

ANDROID AMUSEMENT CORPORATION

For Further Information on the Quasar Industries Robot Featured in this Publication and how you can obtain it for your Trade Show and Promotional Needs

Contact:
ANDROID AMUSEMENT CORPORATION
(Exclusive Western Representatives lor Quasar Industries)
(213) 445-5330 or (213) 266-1994

2324 Lenta Lane, Arcadia. California 91006

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The Quasar Industries’ Robot
A Dream That Came True

By Gene Beley

Android Amusement Corporation Robots are going to be part of our everyday lives, and Quasar Industries seems to have a head start on getting us there.

Gene presents the story of Quasar in a light-hearted fashion, and whets the imagination for future developments. —Editor Nine years before Star Wars jetted through the movie theaters of the world, introducing two lovable robots, Quasar Industries, Inc. of New Jersey gave birth to a full-size working ‘droid, Klatu. Even though Klatu was the result of more than 40 designs submitted by an eight-man team of engineers and scientists, of whom nearly all succumbed to death or serious illnesses before his successful completion, there was no worldwide media fanfare. In fact, Klatu was quickly put to work to help pay R&D costs. From the very beginning, Quasar Industries began leasing the robot out to corporation and others for an attention-getting marketing tool.

To this day, Klatu and his 31 brother and sister robots lend their 15-square-foot conical-shaped bodies for displaying various graphics and logos of major corporate clients like Panasonic, Ingersoll-Rand, I.T.T., major banks, and others who can afford their star-billing rates. Currently, they are leasing for $700-$1500 a day, plus expenses. These robot stars fly first class on commercial jets when they travel to engagements. Moreover, each robot is accompanied by two robot technicians wherever they travel.

Quasar Industries now has 32 working ‘droids, which they call Sales Promotional Androids, or SPA’s for short. In addition, Quasar Industries has working prototypes of the Domestic Android, robot-servant, which will be marketed within two years for approximately $4,000; a seven-foot high security-guard robot with a $75,000 price tag; and a Para-Medic Robot that will work in hospitals that can afford the $50,000 tariff.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN.

Anthony Reichelt, who has an engineering, design and marketing background, started to make a 30-inch toy robot that would speak about 25 words on cue. He quickly learned, after much research, that would be too expensive to market as a toy. However, he decided there was a market for domestic androids.

“We began with an eight-man team of scientists and engineers who set goals of developing three basic robots: the Domestic Android, Century guard robot, and the Sales Promotional Android,” Reichelt said. “Due to the state of technology eight years ago and the economic factors, the Sales Promotional Android received the top priority.

“In 1968 we produced the first SPA series robot. To give you an idea of how far we’ve come since then, we are now working with our SPA 20 series, which represents many technical advancements.”

That first eight-man research and design team was made financially possible through the predecessor company and a small stock issue in New Jersey to form Quasar Industries, Inc. “We organized for the specific purpose of making mechanical humanoids,” said Reichelt, “and that has continued to be our exclusive business to this very day.”

The SPA’s are five feet, four inches tall, which the company found was the best height for maximum psychological appeal in promotional events. The SPA’s weigh 240 pounds, which make them light enough for almost any method of travel. The conical-shaped bodies provide the proper balance necessary for working salesmen ‘droids to operate in a crowd without tipping over.

Quasar Industries’ robots do not have any facial features. Reichelt’s staff long ago learned, though, that there was a psychological advantage: their robots didn’t get type-casted into a set image. They were identified with the sponsor.

Underneath the exterior costumes and “stage” names beats the heart of Klatu’s Q-16, special robotic comptuer, designed from scratch and capable of voice recognition and audio responses. Reichelt explains that the SPA rolls on hidden tires underneath its conical-shaped body and can go in any direction at various speeds. Arms, elbows, and hands are fully programmed and can operate independently. Though the SPA can’t see in the same sense as humans, its sensors detect shades of light to determine mass. In an uncluttered area, the SPA’s can move with great freedom. When the crowd gets too big, it will go to sensory overload, stand still, until it is able to act again. Air-filled rubber rings encircling the conical base of the robots provide sensors to prevent bumping into objects. The SPA has a top speed of about 20 miles an hour.

Quasar Industries started to design a five-digit hand but rejected it because of overall cost and power requirements to build six motors necessary to operate each assembly. The final two-digit system in use today required almost one year of revisions before it was perfected. The steel tube arms with elbow, wrist, and motor drives are covered with flexible tubes (that look like common vacuum cleaner hoses). Original additional movements included rotation of the head and waist, but have been rejected for power, space, and practical requirements.

“No one will ever know the total frustration and discouragement we suffered in our small lab creating Klatu,” sighed Reichelt. “Weeks, or even months of exhausting work would be completely wasted with the push of a button or inserting a plug.

“There was no manual or reference book to follow. The team was literally writing the book as they went along.”

Thus it becomes more understandable why Reichelt attempts to maintain company secrecy about the inner-workings of his robots. Although he has made some television appearances and gives occasional interviews, he prefers to remain in the background, or out on the road with his robot teams, as “that is where the real R&D is being done today.”

The original research team was hampered by constant daily problems of where to find parts, system adaptation and body design. But these were only minor problems. “Fate seemed to strike one blow after another, as if someone, or some unknown force, was trying to block our progress,” Reichelt remembers.

“The physicist working in the area of subsystems compatibility suddenly died,” he continued. “Before the team could recover from that shock, the professor, with a Doctorate in Engineering, and specialist in inertial guidance systems, went blind.”

More medical problems hampered the team. The laser specialist developed a serious kidney disease; the mechanical engineer working on the interrelated mechanical systems retired because of multiple sclerosis. And two more members of the team, the research specialist for parts analysis and the power applications engineer, died before Klatu was completed.

That left only two original team members to see Klatu leave the lab under his own power. Inside he contained the desire, dreams, and dedication of eight human beings. Klatu finally could walk, talk, and perform well enough to be leased out for promotional events. As time progressed, the voice was further developed to include inflections. A lightening-bolt-like streak of light illuminates its head when it talks.

Quasar Industries feels, now that the public has accepted robots, it is time to move into Phase II of their master-plan. The Rutherford, New Jersey robot factory is now gearing down to manufacture the Domestic Android (trademark) within 18-24 months. Reichelt projects they will produce 125 such robots a day that will sell for approximately $4,000. The Domestic Android will be programmable via a computer control on its right hand to serve dinner, vacuum, baby-sit, answer your front door, or serve drinks. A 250-word vocabulary will be sufficient to impress your friends and insult your enemies.

Of course, this is straight out of the first chapter in Isaac Asimov’s book, I, Robot, which tells about the robot babysitter. The child’s mother grew concerned when she felt the child should have something like a dog that could return love and pressured her husband to get rid of the robot. The child became despondent over the loss of her robot friend, and the story continues about the search for her mechanical babysitter.

Perhaps the answer, according to a poem by Ray Bradbury, would be a robot grandmother, one who could give “equal love” to her grandchildren. Bradbury, the science-fiction author and father of four daughters, wrote “Robot Grandmother” while observing the personal frustrations of parents trying to give equal love.

REACTIONS OF HUMANS TO ROBOTS.

In Los Angeles, California, senior citizens visiting a department store where the SPA, Klatu, was modeling jackets for a ski parka company, looked in disbelief at what they were seeing. “What is it?” one dares to ask a sales clerk.

“A robot,” the clerk replies, with a wide smile, rather nonchalantly.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” mumbles one of the senior citizens, shuffling away. “Now I can die in peace.”

In Scranton, Pennsylvania, at a hospital charity benefit, the SPA was whirring up and down the hallways, in and out of the rooms. The robot was playing and joking with the children. However, upon arriving at a room marked “Do Not Disturb,” Robot Master and Quasar Industries’ President Anthony Reichelt asked a doctor what was wrong with the child in the room. Reichelt learned the child had been in an auto accident. Although the boy had recovered from a coma and was capable of speaking, he had chosen not to speak, probably because he was still in shock.

“The doctors and staff psychologists hadn’t been able to get the boy to speak,” Reichelt recalls. “I obtained his permission to allow the robot to go into the room with the boy, alone.”

“Why are you feeling so sorry for yourself?” the robot asked the boy. And then they began trading insults, like the robot’s threatening to “put tire tracks” on the boy if he didn’t begin speaking. Within 30 minutes, the boy was babbling away with the robot.

This rewarding experience led Reichelt to observe the need for a Para-Medic Robot, which he now has built and trademarked. It is designed for doctors to use in psychiatric cases, especially with children, and will be specially padded and easily programmed by the doctors behind a one-way mirror.

The preceeding represent the wide range of emotions humans project upon seeing a real robot for the first time. Reichelt, who understandably prefers to travel with the robots, versus “flying a desk,” could probably write a book on the reactions of humans to robots over the past nine years.

On the more fun side of the fence, the London Daily Mail newspaper invited Quasar Industries to bring the Domestic Android prototype to Great Britain. “We had the robot buy his own ticket at the airport,” chuckled Reichelt, “and board a British Airways jet to London with myself and the London Daily Mail photographer.

“We were about 2,000 miles out over the Atlantic Ocean and the stewardess was getting ready to serve breakfast. Phil, the photographer, asked me to have the robot serve breakfast. It took several minutes to pro- gram the robot, and it began going up and down the aisle, serving grapefruit to passengers that morning.”

“And how was your flight, Aunt Maude?” Britishers were probably greeting relatives landing at the airport.

“You won’t believe it — a robot served breakfast for the stewardess this morning,” passengers were heard to reply. Just as the relatives or friends were wondering if they should call a doctor, off walked the robot, with the photographer taking pictures. Few celebrities get the kind of attention a robot commands upon landing at a major airport.

OCCUPATION: ROBOT TECHNICIAN.

There are a handful of humans in the United States today who list that occupation on their official Internal Revenue tax returns. Of course, 25 years from today, the number will greatly multiply. In the not-too-distant future, colleges will undoubtedly institute formal degree courses in robotics — a word barely coined now.

The entire technology is already taught in colleges, but no one has put it together in a precise course. It would undoubtedly consist of computer and mechanical technology; physics, geometry, and a wide degree of experimentation, according to Anthony Reichelt. Although he is hesitant to divulge his technicians’ names “because the press would interfere with them getting their normal work accomplished” and “competitive reasons in a dog-eat-dog world,” he consented to divulge his training system to INTERFACE AGE for this special issue on robotics.

“We’ve taken people from all walks of life — not just the scientific or technical fields,” Reichelt begins. “An example is an oceanography student I met who took a liking to the robot. We hired him part time on his college vacations, and he eventually changed his major to computer technology. He graduated and now works full time for Quasar Industries.

“A beginner starts as a trainee, whom we call a Manufacturer’s Helper in the shop. We tend to develop a specialization within each person. Eventually, they reach the level of Assistant Monitor Technician, which is simply an Assistant Technician.

“Next comes Technician, then Command Programmer. The Command Programmer is in charge of one or more shows where the robot is appearing.

“After about 4,000 hours of actual robot performing time, the accompanying Command Programmer is eligible for the ultimate title of Robot Master. He then may have as many as four different Command Programmers under his supervision.”

Reichelt himself wears a gold “Robot Master” emblem, made especially for him by a jeweler in Beverly Hills. He is the greatest task-master and perfectionist of them all. When they are traveling on the trade show and promotional event circuit, although they may enjoy attending client parties at night, Reichelt, the Chief Robot Master, can always be seen in the wee hours of the morning, back in the motel room, touching up small scratches on the robot’s conical-shaped body with a can of spray-paint and checking out the mechanical functions for the next day’s show. Naturally, there is an element of show business to the bookings, scheduling and behind-the-scenes somewhat grueling life on the road. Reichelt, who is fortunate to have wife Eileen as Marketing Director at the New Jersey headquarters, is proud of their record: in nearly 10 years, they have never missed a contracted performance.

This has not been easy. One time, with a show scheduled in Chicago, he told his two robot technicians to leave New Jersey Friday in a van with the show robot. “Although the show wasn’t until Monday, I told them to get there, set up and then fool around.

“They called me in Pennsylvania and said they were snowbound. I asked them the telephone number in the pay phone booth and told them I’d call right back.

“I got out maps on our kitchen table that night and began pinpointing their location. I called them back and told them to double back and take a road south.”

“How far South?” asked the technician in the cold, snowy phone booth.

“Until you run out of snow,” Reichelt replied in his typical fashion.

Fortunately, the technicians had credit cards and some cash to sustain them. Reichelt ordered them to call him at his home throughout that night, every hour as close to the hour as possible, so he could calculate the speed of their travels and project their progress.

“I called a friend that operates a chartered Lear jet service,” continued Reichelt, himself a pilot and aviation enthusiast. “I told him to have the Lear jet at a particular airport, ready to go to Chicago, in case we needed it. As it turned out, my crew was able to circle around the snowstorm by surface roads and made it to Chicago in time for the show.”

This type of philosophy and perfectionism has gained Quasar Industries the great respect of clients, from a cross section of smaller companies that use the Sales Promotional Androids to compete for attention with the corporate giants, to the For tuna 500 type clients themselves, who love the robots.

Although it isn’t something Quasar Industries will readily publicize, the life of a robot technician can be quite glamorous on the road. Since the robots get star-billing fees and fly first-class to many destinations, they frequently work for clients who stage elaborate parties at night. Even if the robot doesn’t attend, the technicians are almost always invited. Another fringe benefit, not listed on the Internal Revenue tax returns, are those beautiful models most companies hire in trade show booths. You see, robots are very good at getting the pretty young gals turned on with COMECON like, “Okay, Baby, give me a kiss.” But it still takes the human touch to satisfy those very human desires. Although it isn’t in the basic training course, Klatu has told INTERFACE AGE the younger technicians are very good at taking over where he leaves off.

WHAT’S AHEAD FOR QUASAR INDUSTRIES’ ROBOTS?

“Bubble-memory, as soon as it becomes practical from a cost standpoint,” commented Reichelt. “This technological advancement will greatly increase the capacity of the robot and its ability to do different things.”

Century I, a robot designed to function as an automated security guard for banks or military installations, was recently introduced at the annual seminar of the American Society for Industrial Security. At 7 feet, 650 pounds, with a bullet-proof exterior and equipped with all sorts of “restraining systems,” Century I means business. Its single purpose will be to find and immobilize intruders. Sensors in the robot can detect movement, body heat, or noise, and then begins stalking the human. Reichelt said its restraining systems are “non-lethal.”

So when the day comes that Klatu may gain his deserved super-star status, or his descendants start a robot rock group, they will have their own robot security guards. With Quasar Industries, such science-fiction sounding products exist today and will be in the marketplace sooner than you may think. As for the robot rock group, keep tuned into your local radio and TV stations. And remember, INTERFACE AGE predicted it, in April, 1978.

Anyone who might be interested in finding out more about the Quasar robots can contact Gene Beley at: Android Amusement Corporation, 2324 Lenta Lane, Arcadia, California 91006, (213) 445-5330. —Editor

Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns

By Ray Bradbury

They asked me where I’d choose to run, which favored? Ups? or Downs?

Where robot mice and men, I said, run round in robot towns.

But is that wise? for tin’s a fool and iron has no thought!

Computer mice can find me facts and teach me what I’m not.

But robot all inhuman is, all’s sin with cog and mesh.

Not if we teach the good stuff in, so it can teach our flesh.

There’s nothing wrong with metal-men that better dreams can’t chalk.

I’d find me robot-Plato’s cave if he lived on my block;

And though his eyes electric were, computerized his tongue.

Is that more wrong than Berlioz on LPs harped and sung?

So much electric fills our lives, some bad, some good, some ill.

But look! there Shaw and Shakespeare dance on Channel 7′s sill:

A gift of hearts and minds and eyes to see our dark/light face.

To weigh and balance halos/blights that half-destroy our race;

To midget make our rocket-ships, and squeeze grand Kong down small

Then Giants grow from Shavian seed to taunt, provoke us all.

As man himself a mixture is, rambunctious paradox,

So we must teach our mad machines: stand tall, pull up your socks!

Come run with me, while children/men, half dires and dooms, half clowns.

Pace robot mice, race robot men, win-lose in robot towns.

Robot Turns Actor and plays

the role of a ”Martian” in a French production. Built by M. Koralek, noted French engineer, the 500-pound robot is seen at the left “rehearsing” with actress Mag Villars. At right. M. Koralek adjusts the robot’s mechanical brain via its spinal column.

Another English Robot Pilot

PROFESSOR J. POPJIE, an English pilot and designer, has recently invented and tested an electrical robot pilot which has successfully piloted a plane on short flights. Although details of this invention have not been revealed, it is known to be operated by a current from an air-screw driven generator.

Robot With Mechanical Brain Thinks Up Story Plots

FORMERLY robots were merely mechanical devices that could perform a variety of stunts under the guidance of a human being, but now a robot has made its appearance that thinks, has a soul of a kind, creative imagination, and other qualities necessary for writing a modern stereotyped short story. This robot, the invention of Wycliffe Hill, a Los Angeles scenario writer, is declared to be able to build up millions of plots, no two alike, for magazine stories or movie plays.

Mr. Hill has equipped his robot with an index chart, divided into eight sections, one devoted to each of the eight elements of a story-— background, character, obstacle, problem, predicament, complication, crisis and climax—and with an assortment of variations. The robot selects the material as required from this inexhaustible source and builds plots that could never be imagined by the author without the aid of the mechanical brain. Now if you want to become a successful author simply obtain a robot and put it to work.

Interesting Novelties at London Radio Exhibition

ROBOT PLAYS PHONOGRAPH
Sir Robot, looking like one of Coeur de Lion’s knights, is merely placing a record on the portable before him.
(Keystone Views)

• LARGEST RADIO TUBE •
The 500-kilowatt transmitting tube, shown in the picture at the right, was on exhibition at the London exposition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of magnetic induction by Michael Faraday—for whom the farad is named. All electrical and radio development since then has been based on his work. General J. C. Smuts, president of the British Association and noted scientist, who opened the exposition, is at the left.
(Wide World Photo)

• WORLD’S LARGEST SPEAKERS •
The two instruments shown below are models at the Olympia (London) exposition.

The house-like edifice shown in the center of this bottom row of pictures, is believed the world’s largest ; it may be compared with its parent, the actual commercial model, which the young lady is holding. The speaker unit at the right is the biggest cone yet produced. Speech from this may be heard over a distance of three miles. # (Keystone Views)

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OUR HEARTLESS FRIENDS THE ROBOTS

By D. S. HALACY, JR.

WHEN a clock manufacturer needed production line workers recently for a ticklish assembly job, he ordered them from a firm called U.S.I. Robodyne. The workers weighed a bit over 50 pounds, and the clockmaker didn’t hire them—he bought them outright for about $2500.00. Slavery Involving midgets? No, these workers, each doing a man’s or woman’s job, are robots produced by the Robodyne Division of U. S. industries, Inc., at Silver Springs, Md. These “TransfeRobot 200″ mechanical midgets, while not the first automated devices to displace human workers, are unique in some respects. First, they are not custom made, but are standard “off-the-shelf” items available immediately. Second, they are not one-job workers, but can be programmed to handle many production jobs within the scope of their electronic brains and mechanical fingers. Finally, they pay union dues!

Perhaps because they operate in a more dramatically human fashion than most automation equipment, TransfeRobots are in the spotlight of attention being given by both management and labor to the technological and economic problems created by progress. In addition to the clockwork assemblers already mentioned, there are many more such small robots building a variety of items —including typewriters and auto parts.

President John Snyder, Jr., of U.S. Industries, and Al Hayes, President of the International Association of Machinists, head a foundation which is working toward a smooth and painless-as-possible integration of automation into production work in this country. And that’s where the dues come in. Each TransfeRobot (via its employer) pays $25 a year as soon as it goes to work. U.S.I.’s larger equipment pays more, ranging up to a maximum of $1000 a year.

Critics, perhaps with human workers in mind, have described these machines as robot dolls—”you wind them up and they make money for the boss”—but both sides of the bargaining table realize that human workers must make money, too, or they can’t buy the goods the robots produce.

TransfeRobot has a big cousin called “Unimate.” Built by Unimation, Inc., of Bethel, Conn., Unimate costs ten times the modest price of the smaller robot. It weighs considerably more—a ton and a half—and it can heft loads of 75 pounds and exert a squeeze of 300 pounds with its steel fingers. Its builders list a hundred jobs that Unimate can do, including loading operations, assembly work, painting, welding, and similar tasks. It also has a brain, and can memorize 200 sequential movements after being “led by hand” through a new job just one time. Such a rapid learning capacity makes it sharper than the average worker, and Unimate is capable of round-the-clock operation without tiring, needs no coffee breaks, and is not distracted by pretty girls.

When Is a Robot a Robot? Since most of us have a rather vague knowledge of robots acquired by reading science fiction or watching the movies, it will be helpful to define just what is meant by the word. Webster calls a robot a mechanically efficient worker devoid of sensibility. Robots have other names, including “mechanical men” and “automata,” depending on who is doing the name-calling. The more sophisticated term goes well with automation.

Having defined the robot as a mechanical man of sorts, we realize that there are several narrower classifications possible within that general description. An automatic lathe, for example, is a machine capable of working by itself. So is a wrist watch. Less obvious, perhaps, is the time switch that turns on the furnace in the morning or the photocell system that turns on a light at dusk. Such devices rank fairly low on the robot scale.

The next step up the ladder is what some call a “proper” robot—a robot device which does not always function in exactly the same way. A more versatile fellow, the proper robot can cope with unpredictable changes in his environment. If we add a thermostat to our furnace control, or a switch to the corner traffic light so that it changes when a car rolls over it, we have a proper robot. The robot pilot in ships and aircraft is a highly developed proper robot.

There is another type of robot, the “true” robot, whose performance parallels that of an idealized human. The true robot is thus far fictional, but some scientists believe that the existence of man is proof enough that such a machine can be made. Less scientific minds jump to the romantic conclusion that this robot will even be man- or woman-shaped. Developments seem to bear out the former belief, at least, and we may one day be dealing with some very human-like robots; robots that are mobile, that listen and learn, think, show initiative, and act.

“Mobot,” “RUM” and “Beetle.” TransfeRobot and Unimate are still in the class of robots that simply do their jobs over and over. For factory work, of course, this is the best kind. A cousin of this simple plodding type is a robot that acts more flexibly; not with its own electronic brain but under the guidance of a human being. Impressive mechanical men of this ilk include Hughes Aircraft’s “Mobot” (for mobile robot).

An extension of the mind and hands of a human operator, such a robot works in high-radiation environments in nuclear plants, handles dangerous liquids, twists heavy iron bars, picks up eggs gently, and does even more ticklish tasks—such as fastening zippers for attractive young ladies, a chore that rattles some humans.

In 1960 Scripps Institution of Oceanography built “RUM” for the Navy—a Remote Underwater Manipulator which operated at depths of four miles. More recently, Shell Oil Company has used a Hughes Mobot in undersea oil explorations. And robot helicopters have been built, adding wings to the arms and legs of the mechanical man. But the majority of “mobots” developed so far are land-based. One of the newest, and surely the largest, is “Beetle.” Constructed by General Electric for the Air Force, this giant is used around missiles and was designed particularly for those fueled by nuclear devices.

Deep Into Space. The space age came on the heels of automation, and it is beginning to enlist the services of the robots. Plans to explore the moon include lunar “rovers” that will plod or roll or wiggle, depending on the type of surface they find on that satellite. NASA’s “Surveyor” is typical of such space robots, and it will busily poke around and report its findings to earth.

Deep space probes have no tin can man sitting at the controls, of course, but they are robot-manned, nonetheless. These robots read instruments, scan the skies for stars and planets and radiation, and act accordingly.

An interesting idea is that of a human pilot operating a spaceship by remote control using television for his eyes. Already in existence are TV receivers that fit the user like a helmet. The operator simply turns his head when he wants to look about, and the transmitter in the robot craft turns similarly. The sensation is described as being so realistic that the operator feels that he is in the distant craft. This idea of “tele-coupling” a man and machine seems to have an important future.

Robots That Think. Fascinating as these “mobots” are, other robots are far more intriguing. Operating a machine at the end of a wire, or even by remote control, is no very breath-taking concept despite the technical problems. And the precocious TransfeRobot is just a highly advanced wind-up man. More provocative is the idea of control of robots by the robots themselves.

Such an idea is not new. When James Watt put the flyball governor on his steam engine, he gave us the feedback principle that is the basis for automatic control. Thermostat-operated furnaces and float-controlled valves are simple examples of machine self-control. More recently, we have seen electronic computers exercising judgment in processing bank records and other paper work. Here, for all its size and unlikely appearance, we have a “proper” robot and perhaps the beginnings of a “true” one.

For all the pooh-poohing of the electronic brain, there are such devices as “Perceptron” that truly perceive. This electronic robot sees with photoelectric cells, learns to recognize things, and commits them to memory. There is another machine called “Artron” (for artificial neuron) that learns by reward and punishment in a fashion analogous to human learning. Still another robot, called “Cybertron,” solves “alogical” problems —those for which there is no formal answer and which require solution by trial and error. Prodded by a “goof button,” Cybertron handles tasks as varied as the classification of radar signals, and the grading of produce.

“Madaline” and “Hand.” Late in 1962, scientists at Stanford University demonstrated “Madaline I,” an advanced electronic robot that sees, hears, and feels. “Madaline” stands for Magnetic Adaptive Linear Neuron, and the demonstration included such feminine tasks as balancing a “broom” and taking dictation from the boss. Madaline has a mind of her own, made up of “memistors”— electrochemical resistors similar in function to human neurons. The word “adaptive” is the key to Madaline’s importance, for here is a robot not tied to a rigid program.

Many nervous watchers of developments have been happy with the fact that the robot brain and muscle have been kept safely separate, but the inevitable is beginning to happen. A young scientist at M.I.T. recently coupled an electronic computer with a mechanical hand-arm of the “mobot” type and created something he called simply “Hand.”

Thus far Hand is still in its babyhood and playing with blocks. In action, it carefully searches the surface of a table for such items. When it finds them, it picks them up and stacks them. It feels its way around obstacles, and when it finds an empty box, it explores the inside like a youngster delving into a cookie jar. If the box is the right size, Hand will store the blocks inside.

While Hand is visually blind, there are many robots that are not. Optical readers abound, and now there are machines that hear quite well, too. The Japanese have invented a typewriter that they call the “Sonotype”; it’s the lazy man’s dream–you just talk into it! In the U. S. there are computers like “Shoe-box,” so-called because of its size; unlike a real shoebox, it accepts verbal questions and gives verbal answers. Robots, then, not only think and act, but see, hear, and talk.

Robot Baby-Sitters? Years back, robots were suggested as companions for children: combination baby-sitters, tutors, confidantes, and all-around good chums. More recently the idea has been extended to the robot as a handy helper around the home. He would answer the phone and take messages, help with the budget and other problems, remind us of our appointments, and so on.

Only the child’s companion idea has been implemented so far, and this on a far more childish scale than proponents of the notion had in mind. Toy manufacturers have come up with a variety of walking, talking, command-obeying robots that are mighty popular at Christmas time. Shaped in the best science fiction movie tradition, with halting awkward stride and impressively blinking lights, these junior robots have one big flaw in that they cannot defend themselves. The death rate is terrific.

Robot Animals. When we leave the world of mechanical men for mechanical animals, we find some very impressive robots. Brain expert Dr. W. Grey Walter of England’s Burden Neurological Institute has built a number of electromechanical beasts physically resembling turtles. Dr. Walter prefers names like machina speculatrix, for their apparent ability to speculate.

Although equipped with only two “brain cells,” the first of these animal robots was capable of several responses to outside stimuli. Using its sight and touch organs, it circled curiously about a room, backing away from obstacles and shunning uneven surfaces. Seeing itself in the mirror, machina speculatrix almost seemed to preen. When it got hungry (because of waning storage batteries), the robot turtle sought out its den to feed on an electrical outlet!

Walter created a more intelligent machina docilis that could learn, and “CORA,” for Conditioned Reflex Analogue. CORA, like Pavlov’s dog, learned from hearing a whistle and from being kicked. She also exhibited frustration in the face of conflicting orders, a creditable performance for a six-celled brain.

Fellow Britisher W. Ross Ashby built a homeostatic robot which demonstrated, among other remarkable qualities, that of “ultra-stability.” A conventional aircraft robot pilot is connected to the controls in such a way that displacement of the plane from normal will bring about a proper righting force. If the controls were hooked up backward, however, the robot would blindly fly the plane to disaster. Not so the ultra-stable robot, or homeostat. It will seek a stable position no matter how it is wired, much as man adapts to a radically changing environment.

An interesting robot animal was built by communications expert Claude Shannon. On a visit to England he blundered his way through a famous hedge maze in about 20 minutes and got to thinking about such a problem in relation to telephone switching circuits, his own province. Shannon labored and brought forth a mouse. This was a very special mouse, however, and it could run a maze in remarkable fashion. The maze consisted of 25 squares with removable partitions that made possible a million different routes. Placed on any square, the robot mouse could find his way to the cheese in about two minutes of trial and error bumping. On the second run it followed an errorless direct route in the fantastic time of 15 seconds! This is a feat far superior to that performed by any real mouse—or man!

Shannon’s mouse was named “Theseus” for the ancient Greek who successfully negotiated another maze in another time. No robot, Theseus was human enough to require a ball of yarn to find his way through the labyrinth. But the idea of robots is as old or older than Theseus. The Iliad describes golden, three-wheeled mechanisms that served as information carriers for the God Haephaestus, and the Old Testament tells of “golems” who were early-day robots run amuck.

It is often difficult to tell which came first, fact or fiction, and real mechanical men have almost as long a history as the stories about them. Eli Whitney and his plaintive cry of “Keep your cotton-picking hands off my gin!” were contemporary with the doomed Dr. Frankenstein; and the year the play R. U. R. introduced the word “robot” to the world, the first automatic factory for turning out chassis for cars went into operation in the United States.

The scratchings of the machines on the wall were so obvious by 1946 that an article in Fortune contained the disquieting news that “the human machine-tender is at best a makeshift.” Two important developments were described as part and parcel of the new kind of factory. One was the electronic computer for monitoring and controlling operations; the other was the robot “hand-arm” to implement these orders.

Age of the Robot. Robots, then, have not burst full-blown upon the current scene but have a long, seesawing history in which science and fiction have tried to outdo each other. We are, however, entering the important phase of “robotry”—a phase which has had to wait for a number of factors to be right. Among these are economic need, maturing of concepts and technology, and popular acceptance. Where historically the robot has been employed as mechanical bogeyman and stuntman, we are now seeing him gainfully employed.

Man’s inherent laziness caused him to create the robot; his guilty conscience makes him fear it. However, where once we worried about machines going wild with destructive results, and searched our souls to justify this tampering in the domain of the Almighty, most of the fear today is more realistic. While few advocate stoning the machines and killing their builders, most recognize that this phase of the industrial revolution is not without its painful upsets.

Granted that we need automation and its computers and robots, and that the alternative is to “give us all pointed sticks and have us go plant rice in the paddies,” the technological unemployment being discussed is no union-inspired bugaboo. Integration is the topic today, and perhaps we should include the integration of the machine into society.

One ghost should be laid to rest, however: the fear that thinking robots will make our own brains wither away. Years ago many predicted such a fate for our muscles when mechanical transportation became widespread. These doomsayers forgot the old-time cowboy who wouldn’t walk across the street if his horse was within a mile; they couldn’t know that the first four-minute mile, seven-foot high jump, and fifteen-foot pole vault would come long after man would supposedly have atrophied into two hands to grip a steering wheel and a right foot to push the gas pedal. For the same reasons, our brains are not going to shrivel either. Electronic computers have already freed scientists of much drudgery so that they can spend more time on true creativity. Thus, our brains are actually more productive.

As the number of robots grows, and they even learn to reproduce themselves, the question is no longer whether or not they are going to take over. It is simply how we are going to get along with them now that they are doing it. Assembly line worker TransfeRobot 200 is a case in point. As mentioned earlier, the TransfeRobot’s annual “dues” are being used to finance intelligent studies of the problem in a foundation set up by U. S. Industries, Inc., and the International Association of Machinists. Such studies, we hope, will show that dictionary definitions to the contrary, the robot has a heart after all.

Toy “Pugs” Fight Rousing Battle

A PUGILISTIC encounter by puppets two feet high and manipulated from the sidelines is the latest in amusements. Dressed in prize fight garb, they stand up in the ring and swing gloves at each other. Their actions are guided by wheels in the grips of the men playing the game.

A referee in the ring judges the points scored in the five rounds of one minute each. The point of the chin is the susceptible place for a “haymaker,” and when that is struck the manikin goes down for the count.

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Aluminum Man Startles London

He talks, walks, stands, sits down, rolls his eyes and waves his hands, but he isn’t a man at all — nothing but a mechanism of steel and aluminum, cables and gears and electric motors! His life-like actions astonished London at a recent scientific exhibition.

ALL LONDON recently flocked to see “Eric,” the talking mechanical man who opened the popular scientific exhibition organized by the British Model Engineer. With an anatomy composed mainly of steel rods and bars, and a stylish suiting of sheet aluminum, he is an ideal representative of the race of Robots who at some future date are to dominate the world. At least, we have been told so in a very successful play, and many people are seriously looking forward to the time when much of the toilsome labor will be performed by mechanical workers.

“Eric” weighs a little over 100 pounds; he will get up and bow at the word of command, he will make a speech, he will answer questions, he will move his arms, and head to give point to his remarks, and when told to sit down, he obeys at once without a protest. He is very docile, but his eyes flash while he is speaking, and crackling sparks at his mouth give brilliance to his oratory.

He is actuated by 12-volt electric motors, supplied with current from a battery. There are wheels, belts, levers, and joints, all ingeniously geared up to give the required movements. His speech is the voice of his master, or of his master’s man, but how it gets to “Eric’s” lips is one of the mysteries which W. H. Richards and A. H. Reffell, the joint inventors, are not yet prepared to disclose. His powers in this direction have been turned to good account, for he has earned the distinction of being the first mechanical man to open an exhibition. At the appointed hour on the opening day, he solemnly rose and bowed to a gathering of some thousands of eager folk drawn thither by the remarkable rumours which had run like wildfire round London during the previous week. Unabashed by the tumultuous applause which greeted him on rising, he delivered a most eloquent oration, descriptive of the purpose of the Exhibition, and then formally declared it open to the public.

Many prophecies have been made as to “Eric’s” future. He is not yet prepared to scrub floors, or do the domestic washing and ironing, nor can he operate a hand-crane or a lathe. But he would make an excellent salesman in a department store, telling the virtues of the bargains there displayed. At present he is merely a clever combination of well-known mechanical and electrical devices arranged and dressed to grip the popular imagination.

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THE ROBOTICS REVOLUTION WILL YOU SURVIVE?

By Steven K. Roberts

Robots—capable of two to three times the efficiency of flesh-and-blood workers—threaten to displace large numbers of people from jobs. Humans may prevail, but, strangely, the result might be mass unemployment, anyway.

IF YOU EVER want to get a spirited conversation going, just wander into an employee lunchroom somewhere in Detroit and start singing the praises of industrial robots. After you pick yourself up off the floor, you’ll probably become embroiled in a bitter dispute over worker displacement, Japanese auto imports, productivity and union contract terms.

There are two problems that make this issue of robot-aided manufacturing a complex and emotional one. First, the machines do indeed represent a threat to workers whose jobs they can accomplish with two to three times the efficiency. Second, there is a prevailing image of robots as so-called mechanical men that are bent on taking over society. Even at the recent robotics conference in Detroit, a couple of exhibitors saw fit to further advance this notion by using androids as crowd pleasers—an event which, of course, received national television coverage.

Like it or not, robots are arriving in large numbers on the doorstep of American industry. According to Norman L. Naidish of Revlon, Inc., “Robots could replace one million workers in the U.S. in the hard-goods and electrical industries by applying the technology in use today. . . . Currently, about 5,000 robots are in use in the U.S., or about 0.3 percent of the potential.”

This is not part of some dark design to force workers onto the streets; it’s simply a result of the need to compete effectively in the world market. With Japan and many European nations running well ahead of the United States in productivity increases (Germany showed a 4 percent increase last year alone, while the U.S. has managed only .01 percent in the last six years), we are faced with the need to clean up our act or fall hopelessly behind. For some industries—like automobile manufacturing—it may be too late already.

Accomplishing the dramatic productivity increases that will enable us to survive is not a simple task. American industry is heavily burdened by a variety of problems: management structures that often penalize innovation; complex relationships with unions; public relations problems; and a dwindling supply of research and development capital. This is hardly an ideal climate for wholesale revision of established methods.

But there is little choice. It has been estimated that the cost of operating the average industrial robot is close to $6 per hour, compared to about $16 per hour for a typical plant employee. If the robot offers greater dependability, speed and efficiency—leading to reduced inventory requirements and a generally tighter-run ship—then those basic $10-per-hour savings are increased even further.

But this is not a line of reasoning likely to meet with the approval of an assembly-line worker who is being replaced with a computer-controlled arm having an arc welder for a hand. What’s needed through all this is a healthy understanding of the long-term implications of robot use, including its effect on production workers. As Thomas L. Week-ley noted in a 1979 UAW position paper on robotics: “If workers perceive robots, or technology generally, to be the cause of unemployment or loss of income, they will no longer have a cooperative and receptive stance toward technology introduced by their employers.”

A SHORT HISTORY One of the key features of human intelligence (at least as we humans see it) is the ability to create and use tools. This phenomenon has a long and colorful history, beginning with the fossil records from Rift Valley residents of two million years ago and continuing with increasing vigor to this day.

When the industrial revolution rolled around, there was considerable development of tools that would automate the manufacturing process. Not only did these allow faster and more efficient production, but they also gave companies closer control over quality, scheduling and so on. We know that dehumanizing factory conditions ensued, but in theory the use of automation was a good thing.

Even in factories full of specialized manufacturing equipment there still exist a number of 3-D jobs— those that are dirty, dangerous or difficult, not to mention the ones that are dull or dehumanizing. Nobody likes grueling labor, and the pay scales demanded by those doomed to perform it are high.

There’s nothing revolutionary about the idea of using machines to take care of some of these unpleasant jobs; for decades, specialized equipment has handled everything from surface grinding to part sorting. These forms of automation have displaced thousands of workers, but somehow it never became much of an issue. Why? Because the machines were very specialized. Adaptability on the part of a machine, however, is something that competes too closely with human talents.

An industrial robot briskly going about its business is sometimes a disquieting sight for people who have never seen one before. A car body is moved into position by a conveyor system, and a steel arm— with shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand—springs into action. Pausing only long enough to fire off spot-welds at intervals of a few inches, it works its way quickly around the door with the deliberate precision of a spider at work on her web. It is difficult to observe such a sight without feeling that the machine possesses intelligence—and that it is treading rather heavily on sacred ground once walked only by mankind.

This is, of course, quite untrue. The robot, while giving a convincing display of dexterity and planning, is actually nothing more than a blind, deaf, mute, numb, immobile output device for an uninspired computer that is performing a step-by-step sequence of simple instructions. If it has any senses at all—such as “feeling” it has bumped into something—they are primitive; if it has any adaptability to changes in the task, it is at a very low level. A human can select all the V4-in. bolts from a bin of miscellaneous hardware with hardly a conscious thought, but even the most sophisticated of vision-equipped industrial robots runs into serious difficulty with such a task. It will be a number of years yet before a robot will be adaptable enough to react appropriately to unexpected events and the complexity of a typical production line.

Despite all these limitations, however, robots offer a tremendous advantage over the special-purpose equipment traditionally used in factories. Where most of the in-place production equipment is dedicated to some specialized task (and must be replaced or extensively reworked to accommodate changes in a product line), robots are general-purpose devices and need only be taught the new or modified job. Many existing robot systems, in fact, can be computer-led through a task such as spray painting, welding or parts handling—after which they can repeat the operation tirelessly for months.

It is this sort of thing that raises the worker displacement issue. Clearly, a robot that is competent enough to replace a human or two and operate with minimal supervision represents a significant threat to the labor force. But this is counterbalanced to some extent by the increase in productivity—something that benefits everybody, not just company management.

THE REAL PAYOFF Talk of increased industrial productivity sounds, to many people, like a rather lofty and abstract goal that has little to do with the labor market. But take a look at what happens when two hypothetical companies adopt opposite approaches to the robotics issue: The Alpha Company and The Beta Company are competing firms engaged in the manufacture of gizmos. They have been around for 30 years or so and have historically shared about 85 percent of the domestic gizmo market. Lately, however, some low-cost, high-performance Japanese models have started carving out a substantial chunk of the U.S. market, and Alpha and Beta officials are worried.

To make matters worse, both companies are involved in labor disputes with the UGW (United Gizmo Workers) and have, during the last year, reported record losses to their stockholders.

Alpha management decides that the only way to avoid certain death is to drastically increase productivi ty, whatever the cost. They perform time/motion analyses, inventory analyses and efficiency studies, and quickly determine that their long-established way of manufacturing gizmos is, quite simply, outmoded. Alpha engineers start attending robotics trade shows, eventually producing a plan for a totally revitalized production operation.

Beta management takes a different approach. Even though company brass are aware of computer-aided design and manufacturing technology (CAD/CAM), they are guilty of short-term thinking: It is safer, from a manager’s standpoint, to maintain things the way they are rather than to institute a bold new initiative that might fail. Robots are discussed in countless committees, and the buck is tossed endlessly.

The UGW, bent on protecting its members from job loss, threatens Alpha Company with a walkout if it doesn’t agree to provide retraining for displaced workers and to share the profits from new technology with the union. The lawyers work on all that, while a trial robot work “cell” is installed and demonstrated.

Beta Company plods along, blaming the production line for its problems and losing market share.

In about a year, Alpha Company has completely revamped its production line with the latest in robotics technology and quickly begins reaping the benefits of more efficient manufacturing: lower personnel costs; reduced floor space requirements; increased safety; lower workmen’s compensation expense; reduced work-in-progress inventories and so on. Then the interesting effect begins to occur. Alpha Company is becoming so productive that it can lower the price of gizmos, compete more effectively with the Japanese, expand its operation and hire more workers!

Rather than fade away, as did the other domestic gizmo manufacturer, Alpha Company regained its health by applying new technology and becoming more efficient. Beta Company finally died, after selling off subsidiaries, laying off workers and trying unsuccessfully to obtain a government subsidy.

The lesson here is obvious, but the problem it creates involves the acceptance of harsh short-term problems in order to realize long-term benefits. This runs counter to the thinking of much of our industry and becomes a particularly painful issue when the number of workers on a payroll has to be reduced. Even if the very survival of the American gizmo industry depends upon the large-scale use of robotics, it is going to be quite difficult to actually bring it about.

ROBOT TECHNOLOGY It is quickly becoming clear that industrial robots are the technology of choice for boosting the productivity of American industry, especially now that over 4,000 of them are proving themselves in full-time, profitable use. (It is a bit disquieting, by the way, to observe that Japan currently has over 10,000 in operation and is producing around 7,500 more each year—five times the output of U.S. robot makers.) To be useful in a manufacturing context, robots must possess certain key features. By definition, they are basically programmable manipulators, capable of moving a piece of tooling (the hand) to any location within a defined operating space (known as the work envelope). There are endless variations on this theme, ranging from pick-and-place units designed for very simple parts handling to highly articulated arms with as many as seven degrees of freedom (the ability to rotate the wrist, flex the elbow, etc.). The cost varies accordingly, and is also affected by varying capacities for speed, precision and trainability.

The foundation of all this, however, is not the robot’s ability to move its tooling to any point in the work envelope, but the underlying intelligence that guides its motion. It is most correct, in fact, to think of a robot as a computer that happens to have an arm.

But computers are useless without programs, and the robots that will survive in this industry are the ones that can be easily trained to perform different tasks. There are a number of units on the market that offer impressive mechanical specifications, yet require considerable technical effort on the part of the customer when it comes to fitting them to a newly changed production operation. This is hardly acceptable, since any company turning to robots is probably interested in flexibility.

There are three primary methods of teaching robots. The first, which is simplest for the machine but relatively demanding for the human, requires the programming of specific steps: open elbow 62 degrees; rotate wrist clockwise 31.5 degrees; close hand; etc. This is cumbersome and is quickly falling into disuse.

The second method involves taking the robot through the intended path while the system is in the learn mode. Some models require that commands be explicitly entered via a small keyboard; others actually allow the operator to grab the robot’s tooling and lead it physically through the job to be performed. In either case, the operator is relieved of the need to understand the innards of the robot system in depth.

Third, and relatively avant-garde, is the integration of a robot with a CAD/CAM system. This permits the entire task to be simulated on a graphic display, while the computer calculates the most efficient paths, integrates the action of all the robot’s joints to produce smooth and well-planned movement and corrects for out-of-range joint rotation.

At some point in the evolution of robot sophistication, however, we run into a problem. Without senses—sight, touch and so on—a robot’s adaptability to its environment is severely limited. You could walk up to a machine briskly assembling automobile alternators, for example, wait for an appropriate moment, then swipe all the parts. The robot wouldn’t miss a beat: It would just assemble air.

Such an image seems absurd to humans who constantly adapt their actions to physical reality. But it suggests what is perhaps the most complex problem of all in the development of successful robot systems: creating useful senses.

At the robotics conference in Detroit, there were hundreds of units on display, all busily performing ‘demonstrations for the record-breaking crowd. But close observation revealed the machines’ fundamental stupidity: Almost all of them were blindly following a stored sequence of steps. If the flow of parts stopped, or if the pincers failed to pick something up, the machines would continue with the operation without correcting the problem. Most practical robots, of course, incorporate primitive sensors that prevent damage in the case of a jam or out-or-range operation, but only a few can adapt themselves to minor variations in the task.

Picking parts out of a bin is surprisingly difficult. Following a complex joint with an arc welder calls for more than technology now has to offer. Recognizing flaws in work-pieces, reattempting a failed operation, adapting to variations—all call for the implementation of senses and the computational power to process the information.

Although there are a number of impressive machine vision systems on the market, it is impossible to separate vision from intelligence. Computers, alas, are still so primitive that even a simple task such as recognizing a face requires a minute or more of processing time—even then, the answer is only of marginal certainty. We have a long way to go before truly adaptable and intelligent machines start making their presence felt in the workplace.

All of which brings us back to an earlier point: Along with the quite valid concerns of worker displacement by robots, there is a vague, popular uneasiness arising from a fear that these things are more than just machines. The marketing departments of systems manufacturers freely throw around terms like “smart terminal” and “intelligent system,” even though the objects in question haven’t the intellectual power of a two-year-old child. The news is premature.

This technology is indeed revolutionary. But today’s robots are not the androids of Star Wars—merely the flexible outgrowths of traditional industrial control equipment.

Worker displacement? It’s inevitable. But the law of the jungle will prevail. Alpha Company will survive and grow; Beta Company will perish. Some of Beta’s ex-employees will go to work for Alpha. The robots will do the dirty, dull, dangerous and difficult work. And people (the most valuable commodity of all) will be put to work on tasks that require their intelligence—if they have been adequately trained in this newest of growth industries. After all, somebody has to build, transport, install, program, teach and maintain all these robots. MI

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Robots ARE People!

By Richard Dempewolff

Modern scientists can make automatons that walk, talk, see—even think like a man. But only an 18th-century artisan created ‘human9 puppets.

A fantastic family lives in Neuchatel, a watch-making town hidden deep in the Swiss Alps. It’s a small family—only two boys and a girl; but it has a long history. For each one of the three was born nearly 200 years ago!

Despite two centuries of living, they show no signs of age and still look fresh and elegant in their fancy 18th-century costumes. One brother is an artist, the other a writer and the young lady a musician. These wonder children may keep all their endearing young charms and continue to use their creative talents for a thousand years. Neither youth nor health ever fails this remarkable family, the uncanniest members of that queer race man dreamed up—the robot people.

The Neuchatel robots are no jerky, mechanical dummies. One of the robot boys actually breathes. His sister puts a very real, heart-melting pathos into the music she plays on a genuine old harmonium.

They are so amazingly human, not only in looks and individual personality but also in their apparent exercise of free will and reason, that they make flesh-and-blood observers gasp in awe. And, like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous story, these robot children nearly caused their father’s death.

Turn back to a dramatic day some 20 years before the French Revolution. Pierre Jacquet-Droz, Neuchatel theologian and watchmaker, was jolting along in a fashionable coach on the high road winding through the Jura Mountains toward Paris. In a rickety, big-wheeled wagon closely following the coach were three mysterious black boxes, each measuring about six by five feet. Near a wayside inn a group of curious peasants crowded around the strange wagon and inquired about the black boxes.

“The bodies of a young woman and two boys that I myself have created,” called out Monsieur Jacquet-Droz with a quick flourish of his hands. “Each can perform wonders when I bring them to life—which J do at will!”

If he hadn’t added that he was taking his black-box magic to the Royal Court of Louis XVI by special command, the superstitious country folk would have hacked him to pieces with their scythes. Indeed, they threatened to do it, anyway—but M. Jacquet-Droz threw dust in their eyes with his hasty departure.

Before he finally reached Paris with his three black boxes, twice he had to rattle away from inns in the dead of night when friendly innkeepers warned him that bands of peasants were preparing to burn him at the stake.

In Paris, Jacquet-Droz and a secrecy-sworn French assistant unpacked the black boxes at midnight behind locked doors. With great care the watchmaker lifted the two “dead” boys from their coffin boxes, then raised the body of the wistful girl with the exquisite little nose and the supple, tapering fingers.

The awe-struck assistant faltered in his help as the robot creator posed his boys before desks and his girl before a spinet. Then he brushed the children’s human hair and touched up the rouge on their life-like cheeks and lips. After adjusting the drape of their costumes, he gently flicked off the dust from their journey. With a spit-moistened finger he redefined the children’s eyebrows and reformed the curls at the nape of the young lady’s neck.

“Now they are ready to come to life at my bidding!” he muttered as he covered each with a throw of purple damask. When he turned, the assistant had fled. The robot creator smiled.

For all his visions, the Swiss was a shrewd businessman. He had deliberately frightened his assistant. While the master technician ate a sound supper, his terrified former helper was spreading the word through the streets of Paris about the “metaphysicist” who could create living people. Jacquet-Droz had known he, too would. He figured that the publicity would catch up with him by the end of the week. It did.

All the notables in Paris flocked to the opening of his exhibition. Hearsay had turned to genuine belief. Gossip grew hot about what Jacquet-Droz had brought from Switzerland in those three strange black boxes.

“Be careful,” a duke of France cautioned his mistress, “lest one of these puppets suddenly forsake his pleasant manners and descend from his stool to attack us.”

The chance that such a thing might happen added the lure of unknown danger to the mystery about these wonderful puppets that came to life. Some speculated on whether a dwarf was hidden inside. Others whispered that Jacquet-Droz had driven a bargain with the devil.

Meanwhile, Jacquet-Droz happily counted his gate and kept an eye peeled to make sure no crank tried to assassinate one of his marvels.

The girl musician was most startling. She actually played the harmonium and her recital lasted a full hour. As a player, she showed all the skill of Haydn, the noted Austrian composer. Her eyes moved and her lips and entire head quivered with emotion. Noblemen commented on her probable virtue while showman Jacquet-Droz, artfully pretending to adjust a fold in her dress, set in motion other parts of her clockwork-driven drum. Pins in this drum made her fingers and arms move deftly over the keyboard of the spinet and play the new tunes that Jacquet-Droz himself had written.

The writer neatly penned numerous letters and messages, then dashed off a flattering toast to King Louis XVI. The artist—apparently at will, sketched complex line drawings of Cupid in a chariot, whipping up his butterfly steed; the laurel-crowned head of Louis XIV; a hound, with its name “Mon Toutou” inscribed under the belly; and. of course, Louis XVI and his consort.

Now and then the artist raised his pencil, bent his head forward with a studied expression and blew gently across the drawing so that the pencil leavings would not smudge as his hand proceeded with the sketch.

This was the master touch, for the caress of the robot artist’s breath against the cheeks of the ladies present made several of them swoon. When they revived, they claimed that this wonderful breath had been “perfumed like a meadow of Normandy poppies.”

Newspapers of the day marveled at these “living” puppets. In every sense they were the rage of Paris. Even governesses of noble brats held up the three robot children as a shining example of good conduct for the younger generation.

The Swiss watchmaker’s miracle children were not the first man-made people. Manlike monsters stalk through all folklore. Since earliest antiquity men have dreamed of strange beings created in their own image. Lots of human energy has gone into speculation on the chances of producing an artificial man that might really draw the mysterious breath of true life.

Back in 2634 B.C. the Chinese Emperor Houang-ti ordered his craftsmen to make him a man who could always point south. They turned out a clever magnetized figure—probably the first robot in history. He was set up on the rear end of a battle cart to help the Emperor pursue his ancient enemy Tschi-yeou in southern China.

Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Cretans and Greeks also dabbled in robot making. They used hydraulic and pneumatic devices to move their hand-carved little men and thus astound worshippers in their temples.

In the Middle Ages, Albert Magnus reportedly spent 30 years in building a mechanical man that answered the door and saluted the visitor.

Camus made a fancy toy carriage for Louis XIV of France. The tiny coachman cracked a whip and the little horses’ legs moved naturally. When the carriage arrived opposite the King’s seat, a page hopped down and opened the door for milady, who then stepped out and presented a petition to the King.

Rene Descartes, the 17th-Century French philosopher, thought “bodies are all mechanisms” and created an automatic female to prove his theory. When he tried to ship his mechanical woman across the English Channel, a tempest arose. The young lady began “to jump about in an unseemly fashion” within her sealed box. The ship’s captain had the box opened. When he saw the strange woman inside the box, he promptly tossed her overboard.

“Back to the devil, where you belong,” he cried.

Modern robots usually get better treatment than did Descartes’ restless lady. The term robot derives from the Czech word robit, meaning “work,” and came into wide use in 1923 when Karl Capek wrote a play R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in which mechanical beings did all the work for man.

In real life, scientists are yet to achieve this happy, workless state—but they have created many ingenious robots that are taking over some of our monotonous tasks— from answering the phone to piloting planes or working out complex mathematical problems.

Bell Laboratories’ weird electronic brain called Vodor can put words together mechanically and “talk.” In Washington the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey has a complicated machine known as The Great Brass Brain. When questioned, this robot can predict tides accurately for every port in the world—years in advance.

Not only can some of today’s robots think out difficult mathematical problems and talk, but others have sensitive fingers and ears, can test chemicals by “sense of taste” or see through photo-electric eyes. But even the best of modern robots look more like clever gadgets than like people.

Despite all the new tricks, our latest mechanical men lack the personality that made critics of Jacquet-Droz insist that he had sold himself to the devil for the privilege of creating people more lasting and clever than God’s. Nearly 200 years have passed since his mechanical boy dotted his first “i,” the artist drew his first cupid and the girl tapped out her first minuet. Yet the trio remain as startling as the day their creator popped them out of their black boxes in Paris.

Today, in the historical museum at Neuchatel, the artist’s eerie breath still draws a gasp from his audience. The young lady of the little robot family still minuets with a skilled human touch no modern, mechanical player can copy.

Only the writer has lost some of his human quality. Over and over again he must scribble out “Welcome to Neuchatel” for the gaping visitors. Some day, as he hears the same gasp, sees the same gesture of surprise, gets the same request for a souvenir of his writing from the staring line of spectators, he may slip a cog and jot down on his pad, “PEOPLE are robots!”

Take it from Pierre the Penman. He’s had almost 200 years of very personal experience with robots—he should know.

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Robot Suits for Animated Youngsters

ANY costume party, parade or trip in a space ship will be a real pleasure for the young live wire in your family when he is clad in this bizarre suit (Fig. 1). The dimensions in the drawing will make a suit that fits the average seven to ten year old, but vary the size to fit the child who will wear it.

Completed suit has a one-piece head and body, two arms and two legs. Prepare the body box first (Fig. 2), cutting out the bottom completely. ‘ In the top cut a hole slightly smaller than the head box (by about 1/4 in. each way). Cut arm holes in each side.

If you can’t find a properly sized box for the head, make one from flat corrugated cardboard, cutting the openings first, then forming it into a box. Give the facial features the unrealistic touch by cutting one-sided, flexible cardboard strips 1-1/4 in. wide and the circumference of the openings for eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Glue into the openings so they extend 3/4 in. on the outside.

Make arms and legs for the robot suit from sections of flexible cardboard glued together, while still flat, with a joint of cloth or burlap. To allow flexibility, the cloth should be about two inches wider than the cardboard. Run a thread loosely through top and bottom of cloth, then gather fabric on thread to fit cardboard. Leave most of the fullness near the back of the elbow and top of knee. Then tape the cardboard into tubular form and stitch the cloth. Have the arm sections fit snugly enough so they won’t slip down when worn. Place a wire hook at the back top of each leg in such fashion that it will hook into the pockets or belt of the child’s jeans. Then form the units into cylinders and fasten with glue and staples.

Reinforce the box joints with gummed tape, and glue and tape head to body.

Make a cardboard box large enough to take two D-size flashlight batteries side by side and tape to the forward, inside right hand corner of the body box as in Fig. 2A. To hold the flashlight bulbs on top of the head box, take a wire coat hanger apart, straighten the wire and rebend it to the shape shown in Fig. 2B. Fasten two flashlight bulbs to the ends with fine copper wire and solder to the wire frame. Then hook up the batteries to the bulbs as shown in the wiring diagram Fig. 2B. The door-bell switch, bolted to the right hand side of the body box will enable the youngster to flash the lights off and on at will.

To the center of the body box tape a small aluminum foil pie pan into which you have pricked holes to make it look more complicated. To further decorate the suit, give it a coat of aluminum paint, paint rivet heads around the edges of the body-head unit and place a spaceman name in the lower right corner. Glue a small thermometer to the lower left corner and label Weather Checker; just above that tape a small balloon and call it Weather Balloon. To the upper right corner fasten a tapered popsicle stick with a brad. Letter the words Slo and Fast at either side of that and place numbers 1 through 9 around the circle. The letters UHF in the upper left corner add a final fanciful touch.

To don the suit, the youngster first puts on the leg sections, wriggles up into the bodyhead section, pulls on his sleeves, and he is ready to go!— George Laycock.

Electric Hand is made of a lightweight metal, driven by a tiny motor installed in the wrist. The electric engine operates off a six-volt battery. A button attached to the user’s upper arm allows the motor to be switched on or off merely by pressure against the body. Device was developed by Friesecke & Hoepfner of Erlangenbruck. Germany.

Robot Plays Card Games Press Button – It Deals a Hand

TO PLAY a game of cards with this robot merely press a button. Miniature cards are speedily shuffled and a full hand of five cards flash into view. Each hand is awarded points according to the value of the cards. A pair counts five, three of a kind counts fifteen, a straight represents fifty, and so on up the scale.

The miniature cards are made by pasting, side by side on a sheet of cardboard, fifty ordinary playing cards (a complete deck excepting two deuces). These are taken outdoors and photographed, as large as possible, with a 4″x5″ or post card size camera. Trim the tiny cards from a contact print of the negative.

Ten of the cards are glued to each of five wood wheels measuring 2-1/4″ in diameter and 3/8″ thick. The wheels are weighted with lead slugs and revolve loosely on a length of doweling. Each wheel has ten small brads nailed into it and one brad fixed near the axle to engage a bit of spring brass driven into the doweling.

When the doweling axle turns in a clockwise direction, the wheels are engaged and turn with it. Stopping the axle allows the wheels to continue to turn with their own momentum. When they finally stop, a strip of spring on the baseboard brushes two of the ten brads in order to frame one of the cards of each wheel in its window. Each of the springs has a different tension so that no two wheels rotate with the same speed.

How to Make the Control Button

The control button is another piece of dowel resting in a drilled-out block containing a stiff spring. It should be covered with an inch of thin rubber tubing where it rubs against the dowel axle.

A press of the button spins the axle, giving the card wheels sufficient momentum so they rotate a number of times. Each stops at a different moment.

Here’s a Servant Out of This World
A seven-foot eight-inch robot does its master’s bidding in M-G-M’s new movie, “Forbidden Planet.” Made of plastic and synthetic leather, the robot is animated by electricity. Ears are rotating antennas, and its grillework month hides a loudspeaker.

Amateur Chemist’s Robot
Hyman Cordon, chemical student, of Boston, with a “man” he built out of rubber, glass, and other scraps. It eats food and digests it in human fashion, having heart, intestines, lungs, bladder, etc. It was exhibited at a recent “science fair.” (Int. News)