Don Wiggins was one of the charmed young men who became college legends back in the days when just being a college student came with a halo of prestige. A native of nearby Jacksonville, he entered the University of Florida in the late 1940s and in 1951 was named to UF’s Hall of Fame. He graduated in 1952 with an Electrical Engineering degree and was immediately hired as an Assistant in Research before rapidly rising to the professorial ranks. His…
“Creaking painfully, its joints rusty, the last robot to survive the civilization which man is making to replace the dwindling crop of babies, would crawl along to a heap of scrap-iron, the cemetery for defunct robots. “Rain, ceaseless torrents of rain, would bring the germs of the only disease which could possibly affect a mechanical man: Rust.”
Back in 1870, the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser newspaper bannered on its front page the arrival in New York of a troupe of French champion strongmen, including Monsieur D’Atelie: the “Man of Steel.” The article described him as: 33 years of age, and rather slightly built. He has a prepossessing, benevolant expression of countenance. His specialty is lifting objects with his teeth, including a live horse by means of a band round its body. D’Atalie weighs 150 pounds. D’Atalie is the…
I try to stay away from expounding on the popular cultural artifacts from other countries. Going back in time and explaining why American pop culture looks the way it does often ranges from difficult to impossible. Even the English, a culture separated from ours by a common language, has a past that is a semiotic mystery most of the time. Take comic books. Americans invented them (depending on what you consider Italy’s Il Giornalino to be) and the English followed…
Marshall McLuhan may have proclaimed the the medium is the message but robots transcended any one medium by the 1970s. Audiences found robots everywhere: in movies, on television, in comic books and strips, in cartoons, in toys, in print science fiction and increasingly in mainstream thrillers. Martin Caidin created a sensation with his 1972 bestseller, Cyborg. Stalwart astronaut/test pilot Steve Austin emerges from a plane wreck with half his body damaged. Incredibly expensive – six million dollars worth! – mechanical…
Long before Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot” to the general vocabulary in his 1920 play R.U.R., people had a pretty good idea of what an “automaton” or a “mechanical man” did. They learned it from popular media. Short stories, newspaper articles, vaudeville acts, comic strips, and more toyed with the idea of humanoid mechanical servants. Or non-humanoid one. It took a very long time for the concept of “robot” to coalesce around the human form. Not until after World…
A true oddity in the history of robots is the complete absence of robot films in American cinema before the 1950s. By my count studios made exactly zero full-length feature films with a major robot character. Not even Universal, at its twin peaks of fabulously successful and highly profitable monster movies in the 1930s and 1940s, thought to include a robot hero, antihero, or villain. Would-be robot historians have to cheat mightily to drag a robot into their texts. For…
You can’t get your science fiction merit badge without knowing that Isaac Asimov’s robots were made by the fictional U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., founded in 1982, the same year Susan Calvin was born. (Yes, that means she’s a millennial. She joined the firm in 2008, if it comes up in a trivia contest.) When people see the name of the firm they immediately start to wonder what the difference is between a robot and a mechanical man. Some…
British kids thrilled to real-world rockets and space travel as did American kids. Sputnik conquered space in 1957. By 1963 both the Russians and the U.S. boasted about astronauts circling the Earth. Canada launched the Alouette 1, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to enter space, signals had been bounced off communications satellites, probes flew by the Moon and Venus. The Dyna-Soar project promised a reusable space craft that looked like the coolest rocket plane ever. Publishers around the world…
It was front page news in the Pocono Record, serving Stroudsberg, PA, on August 8, 1955. The headline read: “‘Mr. Rivets’ Show Filmed for Television/At Waterfront Farm Near Marshalls Creek.” Intrepid Record reporter Leonard Randolph drove his ancient station wagon the seven miles from town to check out the famous Philadelphia television star for the locals. Look, I says to an intelligent-looking young boy of about seven standing near a tree, what’s this Mr. Rivets like? In the manner children…