Robots (and one gratuitous emu)

Technology saturates life these days, but have you ever seen a real robot in person? Think about that for a second. Robots are mostly confined to industrial uses. Unless you count the three days I owned a Roomba, I've never shared breathing space with a robot.

Until today. I met Elektro. He is over 7 feet tall and walks freely. He can talk and his mouth syncs with the words he speaks. He can even exhale to inflate a balloon. He is voice controlled and can distinguish a limited range of colors. Oh, and he does this without a single chip or microprocessor. He has to. He was built in the 1930's, serving as Westinghouse's centerpiece for the 1939 World's Fair.

Elektro lives in a museum here in Mansfield as part of an exhibit on the family robots Westinghouse created from the late 1920's through the 1940's. The first, Televox, invented in 1927, could call a preselected telephone number to reach its owner, answer the phone, and manage a few switches to control certain actions in the house remotely. In short, the internet-enabled toaster predates the internet by almost a half century. Elektro himself is still fully functional, except that the motors that move his legs are not installed so he could not walk even if he were connected to the power supply.

The way the museum exhibit is laid out, one doesn't immediately notice Elektro, which is quite a feat to accomplish with something that is 7-foot-six, silver, and has footprints the size of a coffee table tome. The floor layout draws one first to a non-functional replica of Televox, some photos and documentation of the other early Westinghouse Robots, and a taxidermied emu. You read that right: an emu. Really. I still don't understand what the emu was doing there. When I turned to ask the curator, that was when I saw the gleaming seven foot robot behind him. He looks like something out of Metropolis. That was an omigawd moment.

I've written this all about "him." In the room with Elektro, it is amazing how quickly and naturally one falls into speaking of "him" and relating to him on human terms. Noticing a dent in his left foot, I commented to the curator, "He looks like he stubbed his toe," even though the lack of toes is quite apparent. I asked, "Can he see?" knowing that the technology for vision was in its infancy at best back then (he can distinguish between red and green).