I. It’s Not a Teddy Bear
One Christmas long ago, when I was a young boy, Santa delivered a small robot dog to me. It stood but an inch off the ground and coolly stared out at the world from behind a night-black visor. Through the eyes of a child it was made from some undiscovered metal alloy rather than cheap silver plastic. It had been transported from a far-flung future rather than mass-produced in a place without labour laws. The handful of tricks it performed filled me with glee and excitement. In short, my wishes had been answered. And if this was a toy, I thought, surely there must be bigger and better robots on the way. Robots capable of firing lasers, doing kung-fu and turning into trucks. The future was now!
However, and it sounds cruel and fickle to say now, as the weeks rolled on my interest in the pooch waned. The smell of burning electronics that emanated from within the robot’s plastic shell had begun to give me a genuine fear that it might burst into flames at any moment. There was also something else, a more emotional or maybe even philosophical concern. This robot dog had arrived with a programmed personality. It’d been given character by someone else, enough to make it difficult to imagine it as anything other than what it already was. A teddy bear, on the other hand, was a blank canvas onto which I could project the life of a pirate or a knight. This toy was a robot and it couldn’t be anything else.
Since then my existence has been relatively robot-free but now, two decades later, another has come into my life. It’s an intelligent robotic arm that I work on most days of the week at Heriot-Watt University. This robot is capable of picking up tiny crystals and assembling them into various different structures. Its purpose is to build components for simple quantum devices, which are machines that use quantum mechanics to do amazing things. It’s quite different from the dog. There’s no silver plastic, no personality, and no pretense. It exists to serve a purpose, that’s all.
Those two examples, one a tool, the other a toy, mark opposing horizons that limit what it means to be a robot. Although a robot’s limitations as a tool are technical and often obvious, their limitations as a toy are what my imagination struggled with as a child. And in doing so I became part of a great tradition. Since their invention humanity has imagined robots passing beyond those two horizons into unknown country. Could a soul one day inhabit a robot’s metal shell? Could it acquire its own personhood, perhaps something more, perhaps something different? There are countless books and films all motivated by this question. And countless people reading them, watching them, and asking it themselves. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to James Cameron’s Terminator, we are frankly obsessed with it. There is a clear and powerful creative impulse within us to question the unknown, that is matched only by our drive to make that unknown real.
Although the knowledge required to build a humanoid robot that meets the lowest expectations of science fiction is decades away, a time will come when this technology is realised. We cannot help ourselves but make it so. There is a crossroads in our future where we’ll be forced to decide how these machines should integrate into society. They will be strangers to us, and we to them. So before we extend a hand and pull them across the threshold, I wish to make what I think is a very reasonable request: Let’s find out who they are, or rather who they will be. Will they look like us? What will they want? My own attempt to answer these questions took me back to one of the earliest robots built almost a century ago.
II. The Grand Opening
In 1928, the Society of Model Engineers was planning a prestigious exhibition in London. The event was intended as a celebration of British invention and creativity. Then catastrophe struck. Two of the organisers, Captain William Richards and Alan Herbert Reffell, were told that the Duke of York was no longer taking part in the opening ceremony. Like true engineers, the pair decided that instead of finding an alternative they would build one. They forged a body and gave it life using three revolutionary technologies of the time, electricity, aluminium and radio.
Finding an electrical power supply wasn’t straightforward in 1928. Very few places had an outlet into which you could simply ‘plug stuff in’, not that you’d even have a plug in the first place! So Richards and Reffell used nine batteries and two electric motors to power eleven electromagnets that were connected by almost three miles of wire. This was all quite cutting-edge stuff made possible by recent developments in electricity.
One breakthrough was electrolysis, the use of electricity to refine metal ores. This process made it possible to produce high-quality aluminium on an industrial scale. In its pure form, this metal is light, strong, and flexible. Ideal for making the sturdy body of a mechanical man. But the most important thing was how it looked to the eyes of those who saw it for the first time a century ago. It’s mirror-like and in the light it can shine brilliantly in a way that must’ve carried a feeling of newness with it. I think we still feel this now and then when we see a machine made from polished metal, at least I know that I do. Maybe it’s a cultural memory of what used to be the future. Regardless, with electricity and metal, the two engineers created the body of a man. The next trick was far harder: They wanted to give it a voice.
The ability to communicate is something we associate with intelligent life; creating a machine capable of that in 1928 was impossible. It was possible, however, to trick people into thinking a machine was intelligent. Richards and Reffell did this with radio waves. By placing a loudspeaker inside George’s aluminium body they were able to broadcast audio through him. This technology was cutting-edge for its time, it was invented two decades prior by Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun, for which the pair shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. In fact, it was Marconi’s company who provided the two engineers with the technology for George’s voice. And, ironically, Marconi would become an enthusiastic fascist whom the British engineers would later fight in the Second World War. Regardless, with radio technology the illusion was created that George could freely talk on his own. To those unfamiliar with the cutting edge technology of the time, he may have even seemed alive.
The showmanship didn’t stop there. When it spoke, 35,000 volts passed through the aluminium man’s aluminium head, a voltage high enough for blue sparks to spray from its jagged metal teeth. For comparison, the modern power lines that hang above the fields and scrubland of Britain carry 33,000 volts of electricity from substations to homes across the country, albeit at a far higher current. The finishing touch was a plate fixed to George’s chest upon which the initials RUR are emblazoned, which we shall get to later. With this, Richards and Reffell finished their work.
On 20th September 1928, for the first time ever, a robot rose to its feet and spoke. The creation looked much like a haunted suit of armour; two beady red eyes glowed from within the recesses of an empty helmet. It was christened George and given the pronouns he/him (without any controversy, I may add). George was sometimes called Eric, and is more commonly known by that name today. Confusingly, a later robot built by Richards also bore the name George.
When the day of the opening ceremony arrived, sparks flew out of George’s mouth as he talked for four minutes to an understandably stunned crowd. Just a decade prior to the exhibition’s opening less than 6% of homes in Britain had access to electricity. Now it was powering the voice of an aluminium man. The people in that crowd must’ve felt like the future had become completely unanchored from its place in time and was now violently colliding with the present. The experience of being alive in Britain was becoming a stupefying parade of technological revolutions, one following another, unmaking and remaking the fabric of society, each time with increasing frequency and aggression.
Despite the spectacle, by modern standards George was much closer to a metal puppet than a robot. His movements were limited to turning his head, moving his arms, and rising from a chair that he could not leave. There was no intelligence within him, only a system of gears, pulleys, and counterweights. But who cares? George just needed to impress his audience. This was entertainment more than it was science. The Duke of York certainly couldn’t breathe electricity. And the spectacle worked—through a combination of stagecraft and cutting-edge technology, George’s performance in London made him a star. He went on a tour across Britain and even visited America, wowing audiences all along the way.
III. The First Robot
Why were people drawn to George? He wasn’t the first automaton to tour the world. The so-called “Mechanical Turk” built by Wolfgang von Kempelen predates him by over a century and toured just as extensively. There are many similarities between the two: The Mechanical Turk was presented as a clockwork man capable of playing chess, but in reality it was an elaborate puppet controlled by someone employed by von Kempelen and tucked away inside a hidden compartment. Nobody could prove this though and, through theatrics and pure deception, the Turk’s secret remained undiscovered for a long time. So it travelled from country to country and played chess against grandmasters and royalty. On one occasion, it even played against Napoleon, and won!
George also wasn’t technically the first robot. That honour lies with an automaton built by Captain Alban Roberts who simply named it “Robot”. Both George and Robot were mechanical men but, critically, George sold his own servitude. Through performances and interviews his creators were using him to tell a story about the future of work. A new age awaited, one in which every labour would be relegated to the task of a mechanical servant. Soulless and dutiful, robot butlers would shine your shoes, robot clerks would answer your mail, and robot guards would protect your property. I believe it’s this relationship to work that made him the first true robot. You see, each of the robots I’ve encountered in my life, be it the intelligent arm or the electronic dog, are ultimately defined by their rigid subservience. They have been made to perform a function, and nearly every aspect of their design has been perfected to help them achieve that function.
Whether they believed it or not, George was being used by his creators to sell a lie just like the Mechanical Turk. However, in ways they couldn’t foresee, there was a kernel of truth to this message. In the 1950s, the modern washing machine, a robot of sorts, would free women from hours spent doing laborious housework. As a result they had more time to pursue their hobbies, live their lives, and undermine the patriarchal society that forced them to perform domestic labour in the first place. A decade later, General Motors introduced the industrial robot UNIMATE onto its factory floors. This was a touchstone moment that began in the automotive industry but rapidly spread across the world and transformed the global economy at the cost of millions of jobs. Manufacturing became more efficient and cheaper than ever.
George occupies an interesting place in the history of technology. Outwardly, he was a robot who was ready to serve but to the people who made him, he was an art project, a spectacle for the opening ceremony. When I first saw photos of his gleaming aluminium head with its beady eyes and gnarled teeth, I was fascinated by how grotesque it was. The old and the new, the human and the artificial, smashed together without any elegance or grace. He’s a jarring synthesis of the automatons who came before him and the robots who came after. By reaching to become something more than what he was, George passed beyond the horizons of the toy and the tool. He was one of a kind, no robot before or since has looked anything like him.
Unlike the automata of the past, there are very few modern robots that imitate humans in their design. There are two important reasons for this: The first is that the complexity of our bodies exceeds that of anything we can currently build. The second is that we aren’t designed to perform any one specific task particularly well. It’s why most jobs physically harm us in some way. We’re not made to type on the same computer, or sit at the same till, or pick up the same boxes for ever and ever and ever. But robots don’t sleep, get sick, or complain. Despite all of this, they can’t put us all out of employment. Society is made to a human scale and for a human shape; the width of a doorway, the rungs of a ladder, and the grip of a pen. We’ve made our world for us, not for them.
The only way for machines to enter our society is to imitate us so that they can move through our spaces and use the things that we use. This imitation is a threat, not just to our labour but to our place in society. George was a herald for a type of machine. They are yet to arrive, but are well on their way. This is precisely what the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is trying to build with his Optimus line of robots. If he succeeds, how will he change our world? The answer to that lies not with him but with the initials on George’s chest: R.U.R. It may seem strange but they spelt out the title of a Czech play written by Karel Čapek, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, the English translation of which is Rossum’s Universal Robots.
Daily Express
Thursday 22 February 1923
THE ROBOTS
Do you know what a robot is? An American critic, I see, predicts that the word will slip into the English language before long, and thence into the dictionaries. The robots are the mechanical slaves who do all the work of the world in Karel Čapek’s fantastic play “R.U.R.,” which will be seen in London shortly. One day these strange creatures learn to love and hate, and then – the deluge. This disturbing tragi-comic satire on modern industrialism is already the talk of America and half Europe.
The difference between a robot and the ordinary British taxpayer, I might mention, is that the robots are created by a formula.
Daily Herald
Thursday 13 September 1928
ROBOTINA GLIDES ON THE STAGE
New Mechanical Woman at Maskelyne’s
Robotina made her first appearance in London last night.
Robotina talks and Robotina goes from place to place, and, to liven things up from time to time, Robotina lets off crackers.
Robotina looks like a jolly old innkeeper’s wife. Robotina has a queer taste in dress. A sort of blend of Elizabethan and Egyptian toggery is Robotina’s fancy.
Robotina is a robot–no connection with any other robot now before the public—-and is the daughter of the brain of Captain Alban J. Roberts, who presented her at Maskelyne’s Theatre last night to an incredulous audience.
Robotina has a sort of reflector at her back, like a bicycle. On this spot Captain Roberts directs a powerful light, and Robotina glides about the stage.
One member of the audience who accepted an invitation to come and see fair play was pursued by Robotina, firing crackers as she drew near, until he fled incontinently from the stage.
When I asked Captain Roberts how to make robots, writes a DAILY HERALD searcher after the truth, he talked about the vibrations of colour, light, and sound. I fancy you mix these things with a good deal of science, not forgetting a pinch of selenium, and serve with a little sauce.
What I like about Robotina is that I can’t see she is any use. She won’t pinch anyone’s job. But Captain Roberts also guides a tenantless motorcar with blasts of a whistle, and lights a lamp by clapping his hands. A man to be watched.
Birmingham Daily Gazette
Saturday 15 September 1928
GEORGE THE ROBOT
Captain Richards, the inventor of the Robot which will “open” the Model Engineering Exhibition at the Horticultural Hall to-morrow, told me to-day that he got the idea of making a mechanical man when he saw the Kapek play “R.U.R.” That is why although the Robot’s pet name is George, the initial letters of Rossum’s Universal Robots are engraved on its steel breast.
George went through such a searching test at the private view to-day after about an hour he emulated his human archetype by going on strike, and refusing to do what he was told. Renewal of some of the internal wirings soon put him right again, and he hastened to tell the time, lift up his arms up like a traffic policeman – move his electrically-lit eyes, and sit down on the right word being given.
George has accepted a three weeks' engagement to follow his stay at the exhibition, and he has been offered £2,000 to make a two months' tour in America. Captain Richards can make a Robot for about 150 guineas, but at present he is doubtful about its usefulness except as an entertainment novelty.
Roscommon Herald
Saturday 17 November 1928
A MACHINE-MADE MAN
England’s Almost Human Mechanical Men
An American in London writes:– Some seasons ago a Hungarian playwright wrote a drama called “R.U.R.,” in which a scientist created a number of mechanical men, or robots, so cunningly contrived that they could do almost everything a human could do. It was regarded at the time as a purely fantastic concept.
Yet to-day the “robots” of the play are facts. There are several types in existence. Captain Alban J. Roberts invented one that has become a highly successful actor in vaudeville. Among the things done by this Thespian robot is leading a chorus number with several live chorus girls.
Another robot, invented by Captain John Richards was exhibited at the London Radio Show. This mechanical man was able to move his head, sit down and stand up, and was able to speak. The speech phase of his talents was in reality nothing more than a radio unit concealed within the robot. But the effect of sound issuing from the steel mouth of the robot, coupled with the flashing of his electric eyes, was uncanny.
Before the advent of either the Richards or the Roberts robot, London had seen Mr. Televox, an American mechanical man, whose initial function was to answer the telephone. Earlier phases of Mr. Televox used an answering signal consisted of a buzzer mounted in front of the telephone transmitter, sounding various codes to denote the response. Now Mr. Televox actually talks.
But it is Captain Richards' robot, surnamed Eric, which is perhaps the most interesting of the three. In appearance, Eric resembles one of the suits of armour that may be seen in the tower of London. When not performing Eric sits placidly on a stool placed on a dais.
The first demonstration of Eric was attended by a number of well-known scientists and inventors of London. Captain Richards stood in front of his invention, and commanded, brusquely:–
“Stand up!”
Eric made a whirring noise appeared to ponder a moment, then lurched heavily to his full height of more than six feet.
“Sit down,” came the order.
Eric emitted a mechanical grunt and obeyed. At the command, “lift right arm” Eric’s formidable arm went up in salute. At the words “move head right” he obeyed without hesitation, and fixed the spectators in a glassy stare from his life-like eyes.
He demonstrated that he could lift either arm or both arms together; move his head to the right or to the left: make a petite bow –and talk. When he made his debut as the Radio Show, Eric got up on command, saluted the audience, bowed and addressed the gathering, formally declaring the exhibition open.
Eric weighs more than a hundred pounds. He is raised to a standing position by a motor placed in the base. Power is conveyed to the knees by means of a belt drive geared down through reducing pulleys to prevent his leaping through the roof when told merely to stand. A second motor is connected with the base of his “spine” to operate his eyes, head and limbs. A series of five levers actuated by wire controls is attached to the frame composing the body, these in turn are connected with pulleys which are worked from a fibre shaft.
“The idea of the robot occurred to me,” explained Captain Richards, who was secretary of the radio exhibition, “when a prominent public man whom I asked to open the exhibition found he could not be in London at the time. I said in exasperation that I would make a man of metal to substitute for him, and at that moment Eric began to be born. I must admit, however, that the speech delivered by Eric at the show was not of his own composition. It was written for him. That’s where robots sort of fall down. Inventors of the future will probably perfect robots so that they may be able to do almost anything that man does, but I don’t think they will ever be able to make robots think.”
Epilogue. New Horizons
After touring America, interest in George waned and he faded into obscurity. His current whereabouts are unknown, although it’s believed that he was likely destroyed in a German bomb raid during the Second World War. Although this robot didn’t change the world, he left an impact. In 2016, a reconstruction of George (now named Eric) was crowdfunded by the Science Museum in London. He toured the world again and found a new home at the Hawking Building of the Science and Innovation Park.
George the Robot remains a fascinating insight into a future that humanity desires for itself, a world liberated from menial labour. He didn’t change the way people lived or worked, but the play that inspired his creation did—-in ways that Čapek never intended and would come to regret. In the next article, we’ll investigate the genesis story of the robots and how art was stolen by technologists to remake the world in the image of their strange fantasies.