Karel Čapek
The robot word was conceived at the beginning of 1920 by the Czech writer and playwright Karel Čapek (with the help of his brother Josef, an acclaimed painter, graphic artist, writer, and poet), and was introduced in his drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), published in November 1920 (see the lower..Read More
Alexander John Thompson
Dr. Alexander John Thompson was a British statistician, the author of the last great table of logarithms, published in nine parts from 1924 to 1952. His table, the Logarithmetica Britannica, gives the logarithms of all numbers from 1 to 100000 to 20 places and supersedes all previous tables of similar scope,..Read More
Emanuel Goldberg
In the 1920s the German scientist Emanuel Goldberg (1881-1970) of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, pioneered electronic retrieval technology and library automation. Goldberg designed, built, and demonstrated a “photoelectric microfilm selector” which contained many, if not all, of the concepts history of science professionals now associate with Vannevar Bush. It seems this..Read More
The Robots of Westinghouse
1. Herbert Televox Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co’s first robot was Herbert Televox, built in 1927 by Roy Wensley at their East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania plant. The robot was based on the patents of Wensley, filed in 1923, 1927and 1929. The Televox could accept a telephone call by lifting the telephone..Read More
Gustav Tauschek
Gustav Tauschek (1899-1945) was a genius self-taught Viennese engineer, with more than 100 patents in Austria, Germany, the USA, and France, mainly in the computing field (from 1922 to 1945) to his credit, who used to work for IBM and who besides the first OCR device, invented also many devices..Read More
William Richards and Alan Reffell
Great Britain’s first robot Eric was created in 1928 by the First World War veteran and a noted journalist Captain William Richards (known as WH) and by the early aviator and aircraft engineer Alan Reffell, to replace George VI (then the Duke of York) in opening the Exhibition of the..Read More
Federico Pucci
In December 1929 the Italian inventor and linguist Federico Pucci presented in Salerno, a port city southeast of Naples, Italy, his study on “automatic translator”. The next year, 1930, the study was presented to the Italian press. In the same 1930 the text of “French-Italian Mechanical Translator” was exhibited for..Read More
Reynold Johnson
Reynold B. Johnson (1906–1998) was a remarkable American inventor, one of the IBM company’s most prolific inventors, specializing in electromechanical devices. He was the owner of more than 90 patents and is said to be the “father” of the hard disk drive, automatic test scoring equipment, microphonograph technology, a type..Read More
Paul Otlet
The Belgian Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (1868–1944) from Brussels was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer, and peace activist, and which most important for us—he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science. Otlet started his work on how to collect and organize the world’s..Read More
Thomas Ross and Stevenson Smith
The brilliant electrochemical expert from the University of Washington, Thomas Ross, certainly was not the first and only man, who can be credited for creating a thinking machine. In fact, Ross got his original inspiration from the works of Clark Leonard Hull (1884-1952), an influential American psychologist, who studied logic..Read More