R.U.R., 1952

In ten years Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything, that things will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines . . .

When Karel Capek wrote these words in his 1920 play R.U.R., such a dream of effortless productivity seemed fantastic indeed. But this week, when Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained the operations of the first completely automatized milling machine, the idea no longer seemed quite so farfetched. Ranged beside the big milling machine, which looked like any other, were three formidable-looking banks of electronic devices, each of which decoded the "messages" punched out on a tape similar to teletype. When M.I.T.'s Associate Professor William Pease fed the tape into a transmitter, the huge machine swung into action, cutting all the curves and corners necessary to transform a square piece of metal into an eccentric cam. Only 10 ft. of tape was enough to keep the big machine busy for an hour--and turning out the parts three to four times as fast as they could be done under human guid ance.

M.I.T. was able to build its robot machine only because the U.S. Air Force paid the $400.000 cost in the hope of finding production shortcuts. But now that the prototype has been built, Engineer Pease estimates that a duplicate, easily convertible to other jobs, could be made for $50,000 to $70,000, about six times the cost of an ordinary milling machine. None of this meant that the robot factory was right around the corner (or that the robots were about to inherit the earth). But the day was measurably closer. Summing up his own views in the current Scientific American, Pease says: "With [such] machines in control, we can conceive of factories which will process, assemble and finish any article of manufacture. It is unlikely that the automatic factory will appear suddenly. Like the machine tool itself, it will just grow by steps, until eventually it is here."

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