I recently read “I, Robot” by Isaac Asimov. At the beginning of the book, there is an essay by Asimov about science in science-fiction and the place of the robot in it—basically. It’s a short but interesting text and I dug a little deeper to learn more about robots.
Who Created the Robot?
First, what are we talking about when it comes to robots? According to Merriam-Webster, a robot is:
“a machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently (as by walking or rolling on wheels) and performing complex actions (such as grasping and moving objects)”
or
“a device that automatically performs complicated, often repetitive tasks (as in an industrial assembly line).”
or
“a person who resembles a machine in seeming to function automatically or in lacking normal feelings or emotions.”
When it comes to Asimov’s robots, we are talking about the first definition, which is an evolution of the second definition.
Robby the Robot in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet.
The Origin of the Word “Robot”
In the context of a machine, the first time the word robot was used was in the 1920 play R.U.R. by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek. Apparently, it was his brother Josef who really came up with the word.
“Robot” is not a word he invented as it is part of the Slavic language—robota means forced labor. It has roots in the feudal system and Čapek thought it was fitting to his story as it was about soulless artificial human bodies created to work for real humans, but revolt and exterminate their creators.
The First Robots
The first industrial robot was invented in the early 1960s by George Devol who worked for a company called Union Mate. This kind of robot is still used in manufacturing plants today. But those are the mechanic arms that repeat the same actions over and over again.
The “machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently” was first introduced at the Society of Model Engineer’s annual exhibition at the Royal Horticultural Halls on September 20, 1928. This humanoid robot created by Captain William Henry Richards was named Eric (another named George came after) and was an armor composed of aluminum animated by a 12-volt electric motor and another motor with 11 electromagnets and a few kilometers of wires.
Eric was mostly for show. It didn’t really do anything.
Created in Osaka, also in the late 1920s, Gakutensoku is the first robot to be built in the East and was designed and manufactured by biologist Makoto Nishimura (1883–1956). Inspired and a bit disturbed by R.U.R., Nishimura wanted to create a robot that would celebrate nature and humanity, not a slave. Gakutensoku could change its facial expression and move its head and hands via an air pressure mechanism. It had a pen-shaped signal arrow in its right hand and a lamp named Reikantō in its left hand. Perched on top of Gakutensoku was a bird-shaped robot named Kokukyōchō. When Kokukyōchō cried, Gakutensoku’s eyes closed and its expression became pensive. When the lamp shone, Gakutensoku started to write words with the pen.
W. H. Richards with “George”, 1932.
Introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Elektro was capable of doing a bit more. Built by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, it was capable of walking by voice command, speaking about 700 words—it used a 78-rpm record player to do that—, but also smoking cigarettes, blowing up balloons, and moving his head and arms.
After World War II, the field of electronics evolved enough to allow real progress. The first electronic autonomous robots were then created by William Grey Walter in England in 1948. He used to call his creations Machina speculatrix and named them Elmer and Elsie. They didn’t look like humans, but three-wheeled tortoises. Grey Walter was fascinated by the brain and this is what guided him.
Next came George Devol and his Unimate, the first industrial robot, as I was writing about a bit earlier.
Isaac Asimov’s contributions
Isaac Asimov didn’t just write books about robots. In fact, he was the one who coined the word robotics to describe this field of study. He also famously created the “Three Laws of Robotics” and I already wrote an article about that, so I recommend you to read it!
Today, Asimov’s ideas certainly guide the development of robots, but he inspired a lot of people with different views on the subject.
As I may have mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I wrote a book about the history of scripted TV shows in the US. It should be published this year in France. What I learned during the research part of the process is how many shows were created by TV execs who had an idea of what they wanted and asked producers to give them exactly that.
Nowadays, the writers get all the credits, but even a show like Lost wasn’t the genius creation of its credited showrunner. I find those stories quite interesting, especially as they show how the creative process really works in what is basically an industrial enterprise. So, I’ll use my work who’s sleeping on a shelf for years now (publishing a book is not a fast process), and explore a bit more about that, starting with the most famous dog detective in the world!
While researching my article about the first video game, I naturally stumbled upon the history of gaming consoles. Having played with an Atari 2600 as a kid, I’m a bit familiar with the time before Nintendo and Sega, but not to the point of being considered knowledgeable. So, I wanted to change that a little and went on searching…
What Was the First Gaming Console Ever Created?
The answer is the Magnavox Odyssey, but it was not someone working at Magnavox who developed it in the first place.
During its first years, American Television was live from New York—or at least from a studio located on the East Coast. The first famous golden age was about live drama anthologies, but they disappeared quickly when Hollywood took over and everything was put on film.
There were exceptions, of course, I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, for example, comedies with laughs to make you laugh. The shows were filmed before a Live Studio audience or filmed and projected to a laughing audience that was then recorded.
I was just at the grocery shop, buying some comfort food to be ready for a low-activity weekend, when I saw a box of gingerbread. It was not, however, the one I liked from the brand Prosper. After a quick search, I learned that the production stopped.
It’s been so long that I didn’t even realize it. Well, at least, it led me to explore the history of gingerbread out of curiosity, because now I want to make my own (will see how it turns out).
It seems that more people ask “who invented electricity?” than “who discovered electricity?” There’s a difference between inventing and discovering, but there’s also a difference between discovering the existence of electricity and the invention of technic to produce it.
What is electricity?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines electricity this way:
a fundamental form of energy observable in positive and negative forms that occurs naturally (as in lightning) or is produced (as in a generator) and that is expressed in terms of the movement and interaction of electrons.
a science that deals with the phenomena and laws of electricity
Who discovered electricity?
The best way is to begin with the natural occurrence of electricity. In that domain, the Greeks seem to take the first place (not Benjamin Franklin, he’ll come way later in history). In fact, the word “electricity” comes from the Greek elektron which means “amber,” because they rubbed amber with fur and observed the attraction of feathers and other objects. That was the discovery of static electricity—this phenomenon was not perceived as connected to the electric current until the 19th century.
It was in about 600 BC. With time, researchers and archeologists discovered what they believe may have been ancient batteries meant to produce light at ancient Roman sites, but also in archeological digs leading to Persians artefacts.
Who invented electricity?
The famous Ben Franklin’s kite experiment—with a kite, a key, and a storm—occurred in 1752. It proved that lightning and electric sparks were connected. But it didn’t lead to the use of the word “electricity.’ That came even before. English physician William Gilbert used the Latin word ‘electricus’ in the year 1600 to describe the product of that first Greek experiment. And a few years later, another English scientist, Thomas Browne, used the word ‘electricity’ in a paper in which he talked about his research based on William Gilbert’s work. That said, Franklin’s work inspired a lot of Europeans.
Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (1816)
English scientists were really dedicated to exploring the possibilities of electricity. In the early 1700s, Francis Hauksbee invented the first electrostatic generator based on German scientist Otto von Guericke’s invention—it was a primitive form of the frictional electrical machine. But it’s another discussion, one about lamps.
Francis Hauksbee was a member of The Royal Society—formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge—as was William Nicholson who, with surgeon Anthony Carlisle, discovered electrolysis in May 1800, the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen by voltaic current. This led Italian physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to the discovery of the voltaic pile, a battery. That’s why batteries are rated in volts.
Englishman Michael Faraday is also famous for the construction of a voltaic pile, one with seven British halfpenny coins stacked together with seven disks of sheet zinc, and six pieces of paper moistened with salt water—as it was learned in 1812. A few years later, in 1821, after the Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetism, Faraday built devices to produce what he called ‘electromagnetic rotation’—one of these is known as the homopolar motor, and helped build the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology. These discoveries can’t all be credited to Faraday though. He based his work on the failed experiments of William Hyde Wollaston and Humphry Davy, fellow members of the Royal Society.
Michael Faraday English Scientist is a drawing by Mary Evans
But Faraday didn’t stop there. He explored the electromagnetic properties of materials, worked with light and magnets, and more. In 1831, he discovered electromagnetic induction—the production of an electromotive force across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field. What he established was then modeled mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell as Faraday’s law. This discovery leads Faraday to construct the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators and the electric motor. Finally, Faraday established that only a single ‘electricity’ exists—at that time, it was thought that there was more than one.
Faraday was not the only one influenced by Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery. Another one was André-Marie Ampère, a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as ‘electrodynamics.’ For him, it really started when his friend François Arago showed the members of the French Academy of Sciences the discovery made by Ørsted. After that, Ampère began developing a mathematical and physical theory to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism. He showed that two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or opposite directions, respectively. This is what laid the foundation of electrodynamics and, of course, Ampère’s law, which states that the mutual action of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their lengths and the intensities of their currents. The base unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI) was subsequently named after him—the ‘ampere’ or ‘amp.’
In 1826, German physicist Georg Ohm defined the relationship between power, voltage, current, and resistance in what is now known as ‘Ohm’s Law.’ That’s why the ohm became the basic unit for resistance.
Really, the late 19th century saw the greatest progress in electrical engineering. As you may have noticed, I avoided talking about lights, and more precisely the light bulb, because it will be the subject of another article. For now, let’s go back to electricity.
James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish scientist who specialized in the field of mathematical physics. In 1865, he published ‘A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,’ a paper on electromagnetism in which he derived an electromagnetic wave equation with a velocity for light in close agreement with measurements made by experiment, and deduced that light is an electromagnetic wave. Basically, he demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves move at the speed of light. His work made him a founder of the modern field of electrical engineering.
It certainly influenced German physicist Heinrich Hertz who, in 1886, was the first to conclusively prove the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. Hertz’s proof of the existence of airborne electromagnetic waves led to an explosion of experimentation with this new form of electromagnetic radiation, which was called ‘Hertzian waves.’ That was until the 1910s when the term ‘radio waves’ became current.
Other discoveries were made after that. A lot. We will explore those subjects in subsequent articles.
The Commercial Electricity
Discoveries, theories, and experiments had to lead somewhere. We needed practical uses of electricity. Michael Faraday’s power generator set the stage for an electrical revolution—this is where the history of the light bulb became important. Having light bulbs was useless unless you had a practical source of energy to power them. Thomas Edison wanted to provide that. In order to make electricity practical and inexpensive. In 1882, he built the first electric power plant that was able to produce electricity, the Pearl Street generating station’s electrical power distribution system, which provided 110 volts of direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.
Nikola Tesla
By working in Paris with the Continental Edison Company, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla gained a lot of practical experience in electrical engineering. Soon, he started to design and build updated versions of generating dynamos and motors. In 1884, he moved to the United States with the help of his manager, Charles Batchelor. He ended up working on street lighting but quit after six months with the company. That didn’t stop his work and his new systems didn’t go unnoticed. Nevertheless, investors were not interested in his ideas for new types of alternating current (AC) motors and electrical transmission equipment.
Thomas Edison’s direct current had limitations that were overcome by the AC. In fact, in Europe, the AC power system was developed and adopted rapidly after 1886. In the US, Edison tried to discredit alternating currents as too dangerous in a public campaign called the ‘war of the currents.’ But progress can’t be stopped and, in 1888, alternating current systems gained further viability with the introduction of a functional AC motor—Nikola Tesla’s design for an induction motor was one of them. With Thomas Edison leaving the electric power business, direct current lost the war, and, by October 1890, Edison Machine Works began developing AC-based equipment. Mergers, patents, and other financial deals pushed AC power to the front. Well into the 20th century, some cities still used DC, but most adopted AC quickly.
A lot of people contributed to the ‘invention’ of electricity as we think of it today. Now, the difficulty is to produce more and more of it. That leads to new inventions!
I am a Sagittarius. I don’t know what that could mean, except that I was born between November 22 and December 21. That said, for some who are into astrology, it seems to have more meaning and I was curious to know where does that came from. So, I looked into it:
Who created Astrology?
According to Merriam-Webster, “Astrology is the divination of the supposed influences of the stars and planets on human affairs and terrestrial events by their positions and aspects.” Its history spans thousands of years, beginning in ancient Mesopotamia and continuing until the present day. It is not anything new.
The history of astrology can be traced back to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, in the 3rd millennium BC. In these ancient times, astrology was intimately entwined with astronomy, and the distinction between the two disciplines was blurred. The celestial bodies, including stars and planets, were seen as potent forces that could influence earthly affairs and human lives.
