The original text was written by Dan Wohlbruck and can be found here.
It happened in September 1928
Dan Wohlbruck adds to his “When Did This Happen?” series of essays about the first human-looking robot. He reports, surprisingly, that “Eric was a simple and successful substitute for the Duke of York.”
On September 20, 1928, Eric, the first human-looking robot, opened the Society of Model Engineers Exhibition in London. Captain William Richards, a journalist and World War I veteran, and A. H. Reffell, an engineer, were the inventors. Captain Richards was inspired to build Eric when the Duke of York, who had been invited to open the exhibition, was unable to attend the ceremony. Eric’s presentation is described on the cyberneticzoo.com website as follows:
“Eric stood up, bowed his head, looked to the right and left, and, with appropriate gestures, delivered a four-minute opening speech.”
Eric was made of aluminum and weighed approximately 63 kg. Eric’s movements were powered by small electric motors, and his eyes were electric lights. Eric’s voice was transmitted by wireless radio and emitted through a loudspeaker in his mouth. Eric couldn’t think and had no computing capability. Eric was a simple and successful substitute for the Duke of York.
(Eric can be seen here.)
Other Pioneer Robots
Eric wasn’t the first human-looking machine ever designed, however. Even Leonardo da Vinci took up the subject of robots. In 1957, an Italian researcher looking through da Vinci’s documents discovered a model of a mechanical knight. The design included diagrams of gears and motors to power the warrior. In 2002, for a BBC documentary, Leonardo da Vinci’s robot was built.
After the robot Eric, there were a number of other human-looking robots, but not many working human-like machines. During World War II, however, serious work began on creating human replacements. In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts produced pioneering work on neural networks. In 1946, George Devol invented a device that controlled machines using magnetic recordings; and in 1948, Norbert Wiener, then at MIT, published the book whose title coined the term cybernetics. Also in 1948, a little-known inventor named William Grey Walter built two mechanical tortoises called Elmer and Elsie, which really looked, moved, and behaved like tortoises.
In 1956, at a conference in Dartmouth, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence to describe thinking machines.
From Elmer and Elsie, we move on to 1961, when the first industrial robot went to work handling castings and doing spot welding on the General Motors assembly line. The robotic arm, called Unimate, weighed about 1,814 kg and executed instructions stored on a magnetic drum. Unimate was created by Devol and Joseph Engelberger, who founded the company Unimation. To this day, Unimate is the most successful of all industrial robots.
By 1973, the focus of robotics development had shifted from Great Britain, through the United States, to Japan, where Waseda University demonstrated Wabot-1. Wabot-1 was the first anthropomorphic robot built at full scale. It had separate systems for controlling its limbs, vision, and communication. Wabot-1 spoke Japanese and used artificial ears, eyes, and a mouth. Wabot-1 walked on its legs and grasped with hands that had tactile sensors.
A 180 kg Mechanical Insect
The race goes on. In March 1982, Odetics, Inc. of Anaheim, California, introduced ODEX I and even coined a new word to describe the machine: “functoid.” ODEX I walked on six legs and weighed less than 180 kg. Odetics said ODEX I demonstrated unique capabilities as a “mobile robot.” In a report about the functoid, Robotics Age magazine wrote, “Odetics intends for the first functoid to be part of a new era in the robotics industry, in which a multipurpose unit can literally walk through a factory and work virtually anywhere.”
Not to be left behind, Honda presented the first model of its ASIMO robot in 1986. ASIMO is a little shorter than the average adult, and by 2005 it had 34 degrees of freedom of movement (three in the head, seven in each arm, two in each hand, one in the torso, and six in each leg).
Despite their human appearance, or even their ability to perform human actions, robots only achieve the goal of replacing humans in movies and science fiction. In 1940 and 1941, Isaac Asimov began his series of novels and short stories about robots. Then, in 1950, he published I, Robot, a collection of many of his short stories. In one of those stories, Asimov introduced his famous Three Laws of Robotics. Asimov’s books inspired the iconic Star Wars characters C-3PO and R2-D2.
In Asimov’s book Foundation and Earth, the robot Daneel is found alive on the moon. He has existed for 20,000 years and admits that he has gently guided the progress of the galaxy and respects the Laws of Robotics.
The challenge of building machines to replace humans isn’t over yet. It began more than 80 years ago with Eric the robot, and that is “when it happened.”