Long before the word robot, inventors built mechanical waitresses, drummers and a digesting duck
The word robot dates only from a 1920s Czech play, where it meant forced labourer. The machines are far older. A 13th-century engineer built a hydraulic waitress that appeared through a door with a drink, and an 18th-century French duck pretended to eat and digest its dinner.
Karel Capek introduced the term in R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots. He built it from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour or drudgery, which traces back to an Old Slavic word for a slave. There is still no agreed definition, but most people expect a robot to take programming, sense its surroundings, act with some independence and move itself or other things.
Stories of artificial people run deep. Greek myth had Talos, a bronze giant patrolling Crete, and golden servants made by Hephaestus; Jewish and Norse legends told of stone or clay giants. Real devices followed. Archytas described a steam-driven mechanical pigeon in the 4th century BCE, and Hero of Alexandria designed machines running on air, water and steam, including one that seemed to speak. In 1066 China's Su Song built a clock tower whose drummer could play different rhythms by moving pegs on a drum, an early programmable machine.
Ismail al-Jazari, a 13th-century polymath, powered his automata with water: peacocks, gates, and a serving figure fed by a reservoir. His hand-washing machine refilled its basin after a lever drained it, using a flush mechanism like today's toilets. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a humanoid around 1495 that could sit up and move its arms, head and jaw. Jacques de Vaucanson's duck, shown in 1738 and 1739, flapped, stretched its neck, and excreted matter it had stored in advance. Pierre Jaquet-Droz's writing and music-playing figures of 1774 still work.
Electronics changed the game. William Grey Walter built the first electronic autonomous robots in Bristol in 1948, and George Devol's Unimate of 1954 became the first programmable commercial one. General Motors bought it in 1961 to pull scorching metal parts from die-casting machines in New Jersey, the sort of dangerous, repetitive work robots still take over.
Source: Robot
