Page 22 - Robots Androids and Animatrons : 12 Incredible Projects You Can Build

In the beginning 1

SOME HISTORIANS BELIEVE THE ORIGIN OF ROBOTICS CAN
be traced back to the ancient Greeks. It was around 270 BC when
Ctesibus (a Greek engineer) made organs and water clocks with
movable figures.

Other historians believe robotics began with mechanical dolls. In
the 1770s, Pierre Jacquet-Droz, a Swiss clock maker and inventor
of the wristwatch, created three ingenious mechanical dolls. He 1
made the dolls so that each one could perform a specific function:
one would write, another would play music on an organ, and the
third could draw a picture. As sophisticated as they were, the dolls,
whose purpose was to amuse royalty, performed all their respective
feats using gears, cogs, pegs, and springs.
More recently, in 1898, Nikola Tesla built a radio-controlled sub-
mersible boat. This was no small feat in 1898. The submersible was
demonstrated in Madison Square Garden. Although Nikola Tesla
had plans to make the boat autonomous, lack of funding prevented
further research.
The word “robot” was first used in a 1921 play titled R.U.R.: Rossum’s
Universal Robots, by Czechoslovakian writer Karel Capek. Robot is a
Czech word meaning “worker.” The play described mechanical ser-
vants, the “robots.” When the robots were endowed with emotion,
they turned on their masters and destroyed them.

Historically, we have sought to endow inanimate objects that re-
semble the human form with human abilities and attributes. From
this is derived the word anthrobots, robots in human form.

Team LRN In the beginning

Copyright 2002, 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click Here for Terms of Use.