In 1939, Westinghouse's Elektro walked, talked, smoked
Once the world's most famous robot, a 7-foot aluminum man that smoked cigarettes, called people "toots" and appeared on the silver screen with a legendary showgirl somehow slipped into obscurity.
That could change in November, when the Heinz History Center opens an exhibit on Pittsburgh innovations that includes Elektro, a Westinghouse robot built for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
The Heinz museum's Elektro will be a copy. The original appears destined to remain in a small museum in Mansfield, Ohio, sharing space with a diorama of stuffed ducks attending a wedding.
"He does not leave my sight," Scott Schaut, curator of the Mansfield Memorial Museum, said of Elektro. "He stays here. He will not be leased or rented. He will not leave the building."
Elektro was the last in a line of automatons Westinghouse built in the 1920s and '30s.
The first was an unglamorous, remotely operated switching unit until inventor Roy Wensley dressed it up in a cardboard cutout of a robot for a 1928 demonstration. "Herbert Televox" became a national sensation, and was followed by a parade of increasingly advanced machines, most of them built at the company's appliance factory in Mansfield.
Elektro responded to voice commands, by recognizing not the sounds but the rhythm of the spoken words. It walked, though slowly. It delivered wisecracks pre-recorded on 78 rpm records. A bellows in its mouth allowed it to smoke cigarettes.
After the fair, Elektro toured department stores with a companion robot dog named Sparko, shilling for Westinghouse dishwashers and refrigerators. It spent time at a California amusement park.
In 1960, Elektro starred as "Sam Thinko" in the film "Sex Kittens Go To College," alongside B-movie bombshell Mamie Van Doren, a bevy of topless dancers and a trained chimp.
It spent the next several decades in crates, until Schaut pieced the behemoth back together and put it on display in the small Ohio town in 2004.
Schaut nominated Elektro for Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame -- a Web page, but to be part of RoboWorld, an exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center opening next year. Elektro is one of nearly 200 nominees, and the international panel of judges that selects robots for the hall so far has not chosen Elektro.
Nine of the current 18 inductees are fictional, including the Star Wars duo C-3PO and R2-D2.
Westinghouse got out of the robot business after World War II, except for a brief time in the 1980s when the corporation owned an industrial robotics firm. But Westinghouse gave CMU $5 million in 1979 to create the Robotics Institute, which is among the world's leading centers for robotics research.
The Heinz museum will make copies of Elektro and Sparko from photographs and drawings, said Director Andrew Masich.
Additional Information:
Voting for Elektro
You can tell the judges for the Robot Hall of Fame that they should induct Elektro.
Go to hall's Web site and scroll down to the entry for Elektro. Click 'Add Nomination,' then type your name and e-mail, and in the link box type 'mansfieldmuseum.org'.
Names and e-mails are kept private and are not used for spam, said hall nomination supervisor Cleah Schlueter.
