The first robots

First ideas

The first time people started to think about robots leads us back to the ancient world. Many ancient mythologies mention artificial people, such as servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus. Many hundred years later in 1495, Leonardo Da Vinci sketched several plans for a humanoid robot, now known as Leonardo’s robot.


First constructions

The first robot was constructed in 1737 by Jacques de Vaucanson. He built a flute player who was able to play 12 different songs. A few years later he constructed a tambourine player and the so-called Digesting Duck, an automaton in the form of a duck, which had the ability to eat kernels of grain, and to metabolize and defecate them. It was also able to flap its wings and to drink water. Later, in 1769, Baron Kempelen invented an automatic Chess-Player called “Maelzel’s Chess-Player”. It was a life-size figure that sat behind a table, in which the bigger part of the mechanics was accommodated. Edgar Allen Poe, who was sure that a midget sat in the table and controlled the Chess-Player, describes such a presentation in one of his essays.
In 1800 Hisashige Tanaka, a Japanese craftsman, created an array of extremely complex, mechanical toys. Some of them served tea, fired arrows (drawn from a quiver), and even painted Japanese kanji characters.

20th century

In 1923 the word robot appeared for the first time in the theatre play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Several years later, in 1942, Isaac Asimov formulated the three laws of robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In 1956 Unimation constructed the first industrial robot, called Unimate, which worked for General Motors in New Jersey. The age of robots had begun…