When Was The First Robot Made?

Although robots might appear to be a futuristic concept, clockwork automatons were popular in both Japan and Europe during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, with devices such as the chess-playing Turk and the Japanese tea-serving doll amazing those who encountered them during those periods. In the 1890s, Thomas Edison mass-produced a walking, talking doll which could speak courtesy of the internal phonograph. In the modern era, Elektro was a seven foot tall giant humanoid produced by Westinghouse Electric for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Elektro could smoke cigarettes(!), speak via a record player and see with its photoelectric eyes. The first assembly line robots were set up in the US in 1961 and in the1970s, Waseda University in Japan produced the first walking humanoid, the Wabot-1. Next, the US military produced both the Green Man and the Manny humanoid during the 1980s. The modern era of robot development took hold in the early 2000s, with Honda’s ASIMO, Toyota’s Partner Robots and the Sony AIBO putting Japan at the forefront of development of robots for use in the home and office.