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First Time Mass Production Is Automated
By the 18th century in the United Kingdom and France, weaving was a major but labor-intensive industry; weavers required assistants to raise and lower threads to produce patterns. Inventors tried to automate the process, and in 1804 a French inventor named Joseph-Marie Jacquard unveiled what would become the widely adopted “Jacquard Loom.” -
The Term Robot Is First Used
In his play “R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots,” the Czech writer Karel Čapek tells the tale of a factory in which thousands of synthetic humanoids have been created. They work so cheaply and tirelessly that they shrunk production costs of weaving material by 80 percent. Čapek named the devices “robots,” after the Czech word robota, referring to the forced labor of serfs. -
First Machine Navigates on Its Own
In 1949, an American-born British neurophysiologist and inventor named William Grey Walter introduced a pair of battery-powered, tortoise-shaped robots that could maneuver around objects in a room, guide themselves toward a source of light and find their way back to a charging station using the same components that remain crucial to robotics today: sensor technology, a responsive feedback loop, and logical reasoning. -
First Robotic Arm is Installed on a Factory Floor
Known as “Unimate,” the first industrial robotic arm went to work in a General Motors plant, lifting and stacking hot, die-cut metal parts. Created by George Devol and his partner Joseph Engelberger, it could move up and down on the X and Y axis, possessed a rotatable, pincer-like gripper, and could follow a program of up to 200 movements stored in its memory.