Sunday, February 22, 2009
Man or Machine? (1933)
Whenever doing research on past robots of the future I usually have to wade through a lot of exaggeration, distortion, and lies. The hundreds of articles that I've read from the 1920s through the present often describe robots doing things that would be incredibly difficult, even for the robots of 2009. It is much easier when I stumble upon a news story like this one, from the May 26, 1933 Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA).
That's a dude with glass goggles on his eyes. No question. Still, a fun vision of the future. You can read a few article about this California fakebot here.
Previously on Paleo-Future:
The Mechanical Man of the Future (1928)
Our Dread of Robots (1932)
"I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot" by Jack Dempsey (1930s)
Robots vs. Musicians (1931)
The Robot is a Terrible Creature (1922)
Gigantic Robots to Fight Our Battles (Fresno Bee, 1934)
Mammy vs Robot (Charleston Gazette, 1937)
Restaurant Robots (1931)
Donald Duck's "Modern Inventions" (1937)
All's Fair at the Fair (1938)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
I'll bet that dude was just good at doing the robot before it was called, you know, doing the robot. He's a great historical figure in twentieth century american dance, really.
Oakland is a very advanced place. This actually inspired RoboCop - the real one - not that trumped up Hollywood version.
I think it's interesting that you could get teeth painlessly extracted for 50 cents, but a sandwich and beer was 75 cents. I remember it cost me $1100 to get my four wisdom teeth removed a couple years ago, at that rate, a sandwich and beer should cost about $413 today!
so marvellous is this mechanical man. wonder why he wasn't produced at large scale. :)
Dear Blogger,
I posted a comment at your blog regarding addition of your rich content at my site wikiplugs.com and in
return of providing you a free widget capable of displaying your post at random in your pages.I think you
would be interested in Something which crawls more posts/stories than normal RSS limit ? (Unlike other
widgets)
check some examples at,
website: www.13above.com (See the Vertical Banner Here on the right
panel…)
and blog: emailbookmarking.blogspot.com (... and also
Horizontal Banner Here on the top)
Just have a look and then visit http://www.wikiplugs.com/labs/index.html to grab your free copy today.
(Limited Offer)
Your posts and our commitment can do wonders!
So what are you waiting for?Do join and enrich us with your great thoughts.
Thanks,
Admin
Wikiplugs
Post a Comment