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Elektro, the Oldest U.S. Robot
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Feb 10, 2005 12:35 PM
from the i-bring-my-best-wishes-for-everybody dept.
from the i-bring-my-best-wishes-for-everybody dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you happen to be around Ohio this coming fall, don't miss an exhibit at the Mansfield Memorial Museum featuring the 7-foot-tall Elektro, the oldest robot in the U.S.. "Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940 for several hundred thousand dollars each," according to the article from the Plain Dealer, Cleveland. Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words. It even appeared in a long-time forgotten movie, "Sex Kittens Go to College," also known as "The Beauty and the Robot." Primidi.com has an overview containing other details, references and pictures."
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Oldest robot (Score:2, Funny)
Go figure.
Re:Oldest robot (Score:4, Informative)
"sex kittens go to college" is not porn... really. technically it's labelled as "comedy", although i think most of the laughs were unintentional.
full rundown on this 1960, black-n-white, b-grade, cheesecake movie here [imdb.com].
Parent
also used in bad club music (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Movie warning (Score:5, Funny)
[Watching this movie was] Like watching Judge Judy do aerobics in a thong
Ahh thanks so much for that wonderful imagery.
That's impressive (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's impressive (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:That's impressive (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose this is getting a bit nit-picky but your post about how people associate robots with computers instead of mechanics is a bit bizarre since the same thing could be said about computers themselves! Recall that Babbage and Huygens had working mechanical computers long before there was freely-available electricity. I could rewrite your above comment replacing "robots" with "computers" and it would be equally true of the first non-digitial computers:
I'm really impressed that they had something like that over 60 years ago. ...that's before electricity! Computers now are inherently thought of as electronic I think... it's interesting to see that there really are mechanical versions of them. (I know there are still mechanical computers, but they're almost always controlled by electricity - this one clearly wasn't).
GMD
Parent
don't support roland! full text (Score:5, Informative)
Other information about this exhibit is featured on this page at the Mansfield & Richland County Convention & Visitors Bureau website.
"Elektro was the first true robot ever built in the United States," said museum director, Scott Schaut. "Built in total secrecy by Westinghouse, Elektro was promoted as the ultimate appliance. In fact, it was thought that Elektro would one day be able to cook, do laundry and entertain the children."
But let's return to the Plain Dealer article.
[After being restored for $500 by Jack Weeks, whose father, John, helped create the robot in Mansfield for Westinghouse,] Elektro is back home -- repaired, polished and drawing crowds to the Mansfield Memorial Museum. Recently, he was taken off display for repairs, but he will return in September.
"We had more than 4,000 people come to the museum to see Elektro since September," said Schaut. "It was wildly popular, and a good way to get people to visit the museum."
Jack Weeks with the restored Elektro Here Jack Weeks, 70-year old, stands close to the 7-foot, 65 year-old Elektro (Credit: Mansfield Memorial Museum).
Elektro, like the other robots built by Westinghouse seventy years ago, was pretty expensive, but also brought back money.
Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940. The company predicted the robots -- built for an estimated cost of several hundred thousand dollars each -- would be the ultimate household appliances, handling daily drudge work such as washing dishes and cutting the grass.
[But] "they made millions off him," Schaut said. "People came in from all over the world to see him at the New York World's Fair. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s, Elektro traveled around the country from appliance store to store. People flocked to see him. It was a hugely successful promotion."
Elektro at the New York World's Fair in 1939 If you want to know more about Elektro, David H. Szondy has assembled photos and drawings from the past on this page. This one shows Elektro at the New York World's Fair in 1939 (Credit: David H. Szondy).
Later, Elektro went to Hollywood.
Elektro did what many Californians do -- he wound up in the movies. He played Thinko, a giant robot that handicapped horses, in the 1960 film "Sex Kittens Go to College (1960)," also known as "The Beauty and the Robot," with Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld.
Now that you're a fan of Elektro, you might want to buy an image. From this page, you can buy one from Corbis. But be sure to have your credit card with you. A small version (7.29 x 9.11 cm) costs $90 while a larger one (17.09 x 21.36 cm) goes for $200! Personally, I think these prices are outrageous.
Sources: Michael Sangiacomo, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, February 9, 2005; and various websites
thief (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:thief (Score:2)
As I have posted dozens of times before, Roland may be breaking various copyright rules, since he copies and pastes partial and, sometimes, whole articles from other authors onto his website. He does NOT add anything to the articles, he just pastes the entire text into his own site. Many sites specifically state in their policies that their articles may NOT be copied for commercial purposes without written permission.
OTOH, Slashdot, does not copy entire articles, it collects links to the original site.
This thread... (Score:4, Funny)
Oops, wrong website...
pictures (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.davidszondy.com/future/robot/elektro1.
Omar
Re:pictures (Score:2)
Re:pictures (Score:3, Informative)
Technology and sex (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Technology and sex (Score:5, Funny)
There's sex on the internet? Wow! You learn something new every day.
Parent
Re:Technology and sex (Score:2)
Bullshit! (Score:3, Funny)
Here we go again... (Score:5, Informative)
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/ . It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/ ) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per m
Re:Here we go again... (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Piquepaille [wikipedia.org]
Re:Here we go again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, the fact that he actually DOES get a lot o
not a solo project (Score:3, Informative)
World War II (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet another project abandoned because of WWII. It makes me wonder, if WWII hadn't happened, what would the world be like now? It seems we've stopped dreaming. Sure, we've made new technology because of WWII, but it is mostly technology to kill people.
How would the family be today? Would we have to have the husband and wife work just to pay the mortgage? Because businesses learned that they can exploit women just as much as men to make money during WWII, it changed our family structure forever.
I have to
Re:World War II (Score:2, Informative)
Re:World War II (Score:2)
If it weren't for WWII, we wouldn't have had jet aircraft or rockets as soon. Spread Spectrum communications and RADAR may not exist or have been years behind where they are today..
But, of course, if WWII hadn't happened, we'd all be living under the thumb of either a facist Japanese dictatorship or under the thumb of a genocidal facist German dictarship. Millions might not have died in war, but millions more would have been exterminated in the Camps. Millions more would have been enslave
Re:World War II (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously.. RADAR, nuclear power, jet aircraft, super glue, alarm clocks, spread spectrum communications.. the list is long and illustrious.
War is one of the only thigns that gives private companies a reason to truly innovate. its sad that killing another man and defending ourselves is our biggest impetus to advance, but such is the case.
Re:World War II (Score:2)
Re:World War II (Score:2)
This seems familiar to me... (Score:2, Funny)
...wow, just look [lunarrepublic.com] how far technology has progressed since then!
Re:This seems familiar to me... (Score:2)
I don't get it... Are you saying that President Bush is a robot, and thus implying that major technological advances in robot building must have occurred in order to allow him to slip undetected into the world of humans and even win two Presidential elections?
Oh wait, it's a joke. Ha ha, I get it. That's pretty funny.
bellows for smoking ? (Score:2)
Wow, isn't that something this robot was equipped with a bellows for smoking. Funny how times have changed. below is a link to a sectional drawing showing the inner workings of the robot.
http://www.davidszondy.com/future/robot/elektro
Sam Watterson quote (Score:2, Funny)
Robot Insurance: For when the metal ones come for you"
Klaatu? (Score:2)
OT, How come there are no more World's Fairs? Disney's EPCOT just doesn't do it for me anymore. Can't we see some futuristic cars and segways and all-digital homes all together instead of visiting the "Innoventions" exhibit?
Re:Klaatu? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Klaatu? (Score:3, Informative)
The "World's Fair" name was stuck onto the International Exposition (or just "Expo" as they're usually called), which is held every five years or so, in order to celebrate internationalism, the precursor to today's globalism. The name has since fallen out of favor, as the whole lookie-lookie novelty flavor "it's a small world after all" faddish style of internationalism that was the hallmark of the World's Fairs has since faded. It was never an official name.
65 golden years of progress (Score:5, Insightful)
2005 = "Robot able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke, AND, look cool, run and have a processor core that can calculate integrals if needed but unable to prove where 65 years of research have gone
Elektro's best function in two words (Score:5, Funny)
Prior Art.
"Hel...lo. I...am...Elektro. I...am...prior...art...for...all...robots...to... come. Your...patent...is...invaild. Ha...ha...ha."
iron lungs (Score:3, Funny)
Awesome-O (Score:5, Funny)
Oh... (Score:2)
initially I thought it was the first *industrial* robot. Cool as this thing is, it is in fact only an expensive toy. It doesn't really robota, or work, heehee...
And what about the mmuch older automata, that played chess etc... Different ballpark perhaps, not relating to RUR (Rostrum's Universal Robot)
Bender! (Score:2, Funny)
Bender would be so proud! His grandpa was a sexy smoking robot! (blueprint:http://davidszondy.com/future/robot/el
Mandatory Roland Piquepailleing (Score:3, Informative)
To save everyone else the trouble of repeating the same arguments over and over, why don't you just read the main crux of the complaint and an official response [slashdot.org]. Then kindly move along unless you have something new and dramatic to add, in which case you might be able to get in one or two posts before the OSDN thugs and/or hired assassins start knocking on your door
It's not even really a robot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not even really a robot. (Score:3, Funny)
-- Al Gore
The most important part when designing a robot... (Score:2, Funny)
Wow! (Score:2)
Spanky? (Score:2)
I think that might have been in an episode of Li'l Rascals. Oh-Tay!
These aren't the droids you're looking for (Score:2, Informative)
The exhibit will be on display at the Museum from September 7 through November 20, 2004.
The exhibit is over. You can go about your business. Move along.
Oldest Robot My Ass (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Nooooo (Score:2)